How to Disappear

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Right,’ Brian says, nodding. ‘No wonder we’re angry. And the sponsors pulled out, didn’t they? The club’s reputation has plummeted, because two of their players went through a murder trial.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Luke says. He shifts his weight on his feet. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So what’re we going to do?’

  ‘Find her,’ Luke says.

  ‘And then what? Petrol through the letter box?’ Brian says.

  Aidan’s stomach drops fifty floors in an elevator.

  ‘Or worse,’ Luke sneers.

  ‘Good. Good.’ Brian is pacing. ‘Yes. We’ll find her.’

  ‘We will,’ Luke says.

  ‘On to the crux of the issue.’ Brian sips his drink.

  Aidan watches the exchange. Terror courses through him.

  Brian walks the room like a caged lion, slow and sinister. ‘Zara – Girl A,’ Brian says, ‘knows about ex nihilo nihil fit.’

  Aidan’s eyes are on Brian. Ex nihilo …?

  Brian steps into the light. It glints off his glasses. ‘The weekend after the trial, she met with a local homeless person, Anna. We had just discovered her identity, thanks to a stupid court usher. All we had to do was ask. Said we were a paralegal, needed the name of the list of witnesses. And there it was. The day’s line-up. And then we followed her.’

  Aidan stares, his gaze fixed. What? When? It slowly sinks in. That Sunday … that Sunday when she went out to see Jamie’s friends.

  ‘Anna told her that Holloway was connected to another homeless person’s death – Bertha. Two of our players urinated on Bertha for the initiation, she lashed out, they hit back and left her bleeding on the pavement. It was a game gone wrong, is all. But Anna told Zara that when Bertha was urinated on, our slogan was shouted. And Zara can now connect us to it, because they shouted it when they initiated with Jamie. She is the only person who can do this. She’s smart, so she remembered it, used it in the court testimony. And she now knows it was shouted when Bertha died, too. She knows. She knows about the initiations, and she knows about ex nihilo nihil fit.’

  He finishes, having just shouted out Aidan’s stepdaughter’s death warrant, and Aidan sits there, winded, sweating, almost crying.

  Hazing.

  Jamie lashed out because of an initiation. He was provoked after all. The club have been doing this for years. And Zara knows it. That is the missing piece.

  That is what didn’t make sense.

  This is why this group wants to harm his stepdaughter, destroy his family. This is why they want to find her. She has information. She is valuable. And she is vulnerable.

  Brian picks up a polystyrene cup of builder’s tea and takes a sip. His fingers are holding it so tightly the polystyrene yields, little scored fingernail marks appearing. They’re talking about next steps. ‘For me … well, it’s affected everyone. The mood at Holloway – I was there last night – and it’s so sombre. Isn’t it, Luke?’ He clicks his fingers. ‘Look at me.’

  Luke starts, glancing up at his father in the dim light. ‘I was set for the Premier League. Now, I’ll be lucky to play again at all,’ he says obediently.

  ‘Exactly,’ Brian says. His tone is off. Almost mock-sad, a parody, like he is acting. He is riling the group up. Trying to incite something. This is a speech.

  This is propaganda, Aidan finds himself thinking. ‘I know,’ he says. He can’t be a wallflower here, despite what he’s just learnt. He can’t just observe, watch and wait. He has to be tight with them. Be involved, so that they tell him things, so that they don’t suspect an informant. And then, when they find Lauren and Zara, he will find them, too, and warn them.

  Aidan is putting the pieces together silently in his mind. That Sunday morning, when Zara was uncontactable. Shit, shit, shit. He adds it all up. The case was dismissed. She went to see a friend of Jamie, to apologize, to explain maybe. That was when they told her about ex nihilo nihil fit. About another death connected to Holloway. Imagine if she’d been told before the trial. It might all have been different.

  She must have been too afraid to tell them. That she knew information that would make everything worse for their family because she is valuable, now. She must have felt like it was all her fault for going to meet the second homeless person. She’ll have been terrified.

  Another piece of the puzzle falls into place: Jamie apparently smelled of urine when Zara discovered him. And nobody had listened to her – they all told her it was how homeless people smelled. But it wasn’t his urine. It was Luke’s. Initiation. Hazing gone wrong.

  This is why the group was made private. Club only. It is no longer a viral group intent on justice. It is the opposite. A cover-up.

  ‘The most important thing is to stop her talking,’ one of the players says. ‘By whatever means necessary.’

  Aidan stares at his trainers. He’s got to ask what they intend to do. Now that he knows what’s really going on. ‘So when we find her,’ he says tentatively, rubbing a hand self-consciously over his face, glad he is standing in half-darkness, ‘we … silence her?’

  Brian looks straight at Aidan. His gold glasses catch the light above. He turns his mouth down instead of answering.

  Aidan waits.

  ‘Yeah. Make sure she stays quiet,’ he says eventually.

  ‘Warn her off?’ Aidan prompts.

  ‘And warn her not to tell anybody we warned her off,’ Brian adds.

  ‘And if she doesn’t listen?’

  Brian raises his shoulders in a shrug, holding eye contact, saying no more.

  Aidan’s heart is a hailstorm in his chest. ‘If we hurt her, though …’ he says, then pauses. ‘Won’t that just make it all worse? An eye for an eye, and all that.’

  ‘I don’t need your input on my strategy,’ Brian says coldly. He turns away from Aidan.

  Aidan stares at the ground, blushing and thinking. The violence is worth the risk. Because they’ll all go down for this one, he guesses. Not just Luke and Mal. But … every last one of them.

  ‘So,’ Brian says to the rest of the group, changing the subject easily. ‘She’s likely been given a new identity.’ He shifts his weight against the table.

  Aidan moves slightly away from him, his bowels loose. He might be sick. He closes his eyes, sweat forming on his forehead. It’s for the best. It’s for the best. It’s for the best. He’s doing it for the right reasons.

  ‘On the fucking taxpayer, too,’ Brian adds. ‘But the most important thing is: how are we going to find her?’

  ‘Six degrees of separation,’ a young man who hasn’t yet spoken says. He is tall, pale and sinewy. Ash-coloured hair shorn close at the sides, longer on top. ‘My cousin’s wife is a police officer,’ he says. ‘And she once said they always move people more than three hundred miles away.’

  Aidan’s throat fizzes. Yes. Yes, yes, yes: information. This is what he is here for. He memorizes it. There aren’t many places to go other than the north, except maybe Cornwall. Otherwise: Yorkshire, Newcastle, Northumbria, Scotland? He will look at a map later.

  ‘Great. That’s a start,’ Brian says nicely. ‘Anyone else for justice for my son?’ There is something frightening about his tone. An insistence to it.

  Aidan suddenly imagines meeting him as a real, true enemy, and shudders.

  ‘We’ll get James’s scraper going,’ somebody adds.

  Brian turns to Aidan. His eyes are blank, like a shark’s. Emotionless. ‘Yes, how long until you find somebody matching the facial features?’ he says. ‘For the photo I sent you.’

  ‘Not long,’ Aidan says, swallowing hard.

  His mind whirs over it. He needs to come up with false information. Find a similar-looking girl. But then what – lead them to her, an innocent girl?

  He almost starts to cry, right there and then. This was a mistake. He hasn’t thought it through.

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to take too long over it,’ Brian says softly.

  Aidan’s entire body breaks out in goosebumps.<
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  ‘She has a sister she left behind,’ Luke says. The tips of his fingers are nicotine-stained, a bright kind of bronze around the nails and across his index finger, which surprises Aidan. ‘Not sure of her name.’

  Aidan tries to manage his body language. The instinctive urge to question Luke, to correct him – stepsister – and to stop everyone asking about Poppy is physical, animalistic.

  ‘I don’t know why she didn’t go, either,’ Luke continues. He fiddles with the navy zip of his coat. ‘But she’s still here. They were local to Islington, otherwise Zara wouldn’t have seen the hazing. So I guess that’s where she is …’

  Aidan shifts his weight on his feet. Good. They think Poppy lives in Islington. Good.

  ‘She might be a good place to start. School children around Islington. She will have told her friends her sister’s moved away, surely? Anyone have kids who go to school around there?’ Brian says.

  ‘My sister’s kids are in Holloway,’ the sinewy man says.

  Aidan looks at him, and he gives Aidan a slow, cruel smile. Conspiratorial and sinister, his lips blood red.

  Aidan is trying to resist the urge to get out his phone and remind Poppy right away: don’t tell anybody anything.

  His poor baby. She will have to confide in him, and only him.

  ‘How long for the scrapers to work, did you say?’ Brian says, turning to Aidan and looking at him.

  Aidan meets his gaze and feels exposed, naked. His disguise of a slow-growing beard and losing his glasses seems so amateur. What was he thinking? He brings a hand to wipe at the sweat from his forehead. His fingers are trembling. He forms a fist and holds his hands by his sides.

  ‘A couple of weeks.’

  ‘Maybe you could give us an update then? And then we’ll pay you,’ he says. ‘If you’re the real deal.’

  Aidan’s mouth dries up so fast it feels like he’s been burnt. He swallows, but his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth and he starts sweating again, water in all the wrong places. Sweat on his forehead, no saliva in his mouth, tears – always, always, always – at the back of his eyes, since they left.

  ‘I’ll check in with you … next time,’ Brian says. He holds eye contact for a moment too long, then flashes a false, wolfish smile at Aidan.

  He jumps as the burner phone vibrates in his bag as he’s walking to the overground. He stops to fish it out, and sees Kevin – Brian – has messaged him.

  What date shall we agree you will get the scraper information by?

  The hairs on the back of Aidan’s neck rise up. He is being managed. Brian’s repeated questions are designed to spur Aidan into action.

  Give me a few weeks, Aidan writes, the longest period he can possibly stretch it out for. He exhales, his hot breath vaporizing in the frigid London atmosphere.

  As he’s walking along the street to South Croydon station, Aidan sees the sinewy man just up ahead. He’s wearing skinny jeans, black boxers visible just above them. He pats the shin of his trousers with his right hand as he turns the corner. Aidan stares at the shape. Something long and thin sits in that pocket of his jeans, close to his skin. Something like a knife.

  When Aidan gets home, he googles Bertha. She was a German homeless woman who bled to death two years ago. There were, according to a local news article, several wounds to her head. She’d been self-harming on her arms, and had likely hit her head on something deliberately, the article says. But Aidan knows differently now. It’s abuse. Hazing. Games played by the strong in an attempt to bait the weak. He feels sick.

  He looks into initiation, and the case against Luke. There is a reason the murder took place on Luke’s seventeenth birthday: that is the day he became eligible to sign for the Premier League club. And so that is the day of the initiation. It’s their version of a celebration.

  And so the other murder must have taken place on another player’s birthday.

  Next, he googles the motto. Ex nihilo nihil fit. He pales as he reads it. It is a phrase only the elite would use. Ostensibly inspirational, but when applied to weak people, social outliers, it becomes sinister.

  Ex nihilo nihil fit.

  From nothing comes nothing.

  Aidan paces the living room. He is on the phone to 101.

  He has told them everything he knows.

  A very patient woman is repeating some of it back to him. ‘So you believe your daughter, in witness protection, may know something about a wider conspiracy?’ she is saying.

  ‘Yes. A series of attacks on homeless people,’ Aidan says. ‘As part of Holloway FC’s initiations.’

  Eventually, she puts him through to a police officer.

  ‘If your daughter is Girl A, then she is a discredited witness,’ the police officer, Daniel, says crisply. ‘I followed the trial. Nobody would be interested in hearing more from her. In the nicest possible way,’ he adds. ‘There won’t be a second investigation. Your family should get on with their new –’ he clears his throat, like he doesn’t believe Aidan, ‘– their new identities.’

  ‘But if she gave the police that information, they could all be arrested,’ Aidan says.

  They argue for a while longer, until Aidan hangs up in frustration. He marches down the street with Bill, sweat moving down his back like a slithering river, dampening his T-shirt.

  He travels to his old local police station that he’s walked past countless times, in the City. He takes the Tube to Moorgate, going with Bill down the backstairs instead of the escalators. It’ll be his walk for the day with Bill, his city dog. He feels guilty about it.

  At this time – the morning rush hour – it is full of suits. A woman in baggy, long trousers is eating a croissant, miniature leaves of pastry landing on the lapels of her jacket. She’s holding on to the red pole. Her nails are bitten. There is something of Natalie, his first wife, about her. The way her shoulders round as she stands there, her head dipped, short hair exposing her neck.

  He met Natalie in his late twenties. At a tech event, when he was still ten minutes late every morning, cup of takeaway tea in hand. When he was young. Before mortgages and kids.

  He had liked the idea of her more than the reality. He can see that now. When he was away from her, he would try to reason it through. No, no, she was super organized and made great tea and she liked cool music and he liked her laugh, a throaty, dirty laugh. She was perfectly normal: she liked guitar music and planning ahead. What was the issue, again? But then he would see her, and she would say something unfunny, something slightly judgemental-sounding, a joke about an Irishman or something with a bawdy punchline about an ugly woman, and a very specific sad and aching feeling would unbutton inside him, expelling a truth. Something he knew, but didn’t want to.

  She was pregnant within three months. He had assumed she would be as regimented about contraception as she was about the order of the mugs in her cupboards, but she hadn’t been. He’d been a typical man, an idiot. They’d married when Poppy was four months old and they were both so tired the floor felt like it was moving underneath them during the ceremony. They had divorced eight months later when, in the middle of the night – isn’t it always the middle of the night? – Aidan had finally listened to that voice.

  Four years later, he had met Lauren at a wedding, who said to him, across the dance floor, ‘I’ve only got one contact lens in, and it’s wild,’ and that was that. Something happy, instead of sad, opened up inside him. He wanted to marry her then. Life would be forever interesting, with her, the woman who put slices of Dairylea inside croissants and called it breakfast.

  It’s raining when he emerges at Moorgate and his hair is wet within seconds. Cold rainwater dribbles down his neck. Bill shivers and shakes it off. The buildings of London that he’s grown up with his entire life seem imposing to Aidan this morning. He arrives at the police station a few minutes later. He ties Bill up outside. As he turns away from him, his heart wrenches. Their little guide dog. He’s so good. He deserves a long walk in Hyde Park, not this. />
  Rain drips off the end of Aidan’s nose and on to the floor of the foyer, leaving clear inkblots on the concrete floor.

  The foyer is official in appearance, a government building. Paranoia creeps up the back of his neck. This thing they’re in. It’s bigger than all of them. They’re out of their depth. Witness fucking protection. He shakes his head. It still seems unreal.

  Maybe he shouldn’t be telling so many people that they’re in protection? But no, these are police he is telling, for God’s sake.

  He approaches a metal desk and introduces himself. He asks to see a police officer, but doesn’t provide the reason why.

  He sits on a bench affixed to the wall for half an hour before somebody comes out. A woman in full police uniform. He tries not to look disappointed: he needs someone else. Someone powerful. CID. Plain-clothes officers.

  She has black hair, dyed, he thinks. She’s too young. Mid-twenties, if that. She introduces herself as Lottie, then leads him into a meeting room. It doesn’t look like a usual police station. It looks corporate. Metal, glass, angular. It gets shabbier the further in they get. Eventually, they reach a carpeted corridor with a meeting room just off it. She doesn’t offer him a drink or invite him to tell her what’s happened. She just takes a chair at the Formica table with the peeling top. He can’t help but pick at the corner of it. When he looks up, her eyes are on his fingers.

  He explains it all to her. Bertha, Jamie, the motto. How Zara connects it all. He sees a flicker of recognition when he says Girl A, but she hides it well. He sounds like a mad conspiracy theorist, but he isn’t. He’s the sanest, most clear thinking he has ever been. He omits that they are in witness protection. He needs her to be on board first.

  Lottie listens better than Daniel from 101, but, when he’s finished, she says, ‘I have to ask – sorry – do you have a crime reference number with us?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Aidan says. He likes that apology. That apology that tells him she doesn’t go by the book. ‘The man on 101 was no help but, please, will you be?’ he says. He says it to get her onside.

  ‘What exactly are the nature of the threats?’ she says. She has curious eyes. A very pale blue.