Finding Milly

by Nathan Burrows

  He lay quietly, wondering what he should do today. There was plenty to be done, but he wasn’t sure what order to do it in. Malcolm’s words from the previous day were ringing around his head. What could Jimmy do that the police couldn’t? Had Malcolm been trying to tell him something, and Jimmy just wasn’t realising it? Jimmy sighed, unsure if there even was an answer to either question. One thing he had that wouldn’t go away was a nagging thought in the back of his mind that he was missing something. Something important.

  As he thought about getting up and making himself a cup of tea, he heard a very familiar sound from the street outside. It was a lorry’s brakes, hissing and squealing, followed by the slamming of a couple of doors and muffled laughter. Jimmy smiled as he looked at his bedside clock. It was almost eight in the morning, and the bin men were just about to start their round. He thought for a moment about the barrels, and whether they were recyclable, when he realised that he wasn’t sure if it was the recycling lorry or the regular household waste lorry. Then the thought in his head suddenly came into sharp focus, and ignoring the pain in his back, he swung his legs out of the bed and looked around the floor for his slippers.

  ‘Rubbish,’ he said as he slipped his feet into them and stood up. ‘Bloody rubbish.’

  ‘Wait, wait!’ Jimmy called out as he half-walked, half-ran down the garden path. On the pavement outside his house, Robbie had his hands on the handle of Jimmy’s green household waste bin. ‘Robbie, hold up, mate!’

  ‘Hey, Jimmy,’ Robbie replied with an easy smile. ‘Nice pyjamas, fella.’

  ‘Thanks, Robbie,’ Jimmy said, breathless from the exertion even though he’d only travelled about twenty yards. ‘I need that bin.’

  ‘What?’ Robbie asked, laughing. ‘What for?’

  ‘I just do,’ Jimmy replied. ‘I need some stuff out of it. Can you come back later?’ A male voice Jimmy didn’t recognise called down from the cab of the lorry.

  ‘We can come back for it next week, old man,’ the voice said. ‘But we need to get a move on, so make your mind up.’ Jimmy looked up at the cab, frowning.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he said with a frown to the driver. He didn’t look old enough to shave, let alone drive a bin lorry.

  ‘Robbie, sort it out would you?’ the driver replied, not even looking at Jimmy.

  ‘Sorry mate. He’s new, but he’s got a license, so the gaffer didn’t have a choice,’ Robbie said. Jimmy glanced across the road at the other members of the crew, realising that he didn’t recognise them either.

  ‘Where’s Marmite and Fat Alan?’ Jimmy asked. ‘Are they not on the crew any more?’

  ‘No, mate,’ Robbie replied, pushing Jimmy’s bin back to where it had been. ‘We all got split up after you went on the sick.’

  ‘Oh, bollocks. Can you tell them I’m sorry?’

  ‘You don’t need to be sorry, Jimmy,’ Robbie said with a quick look at the side of Jimmy’s head. ‘That’s looking okay. How are you doing?’

  ‘I’ve been better,’ Jimmy replied. ‘But I’ve been worse.’

  Robbie looked at him with an expression somewhere between confusion and sympathy.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You know me, Robbie,’ Jimmy said as the driver put the lorry into gear and inched the vehicle forwards a few feet before stamping on the brakes. ‘Can’t keep a good man down.’

  Twenty minutes later, Jimmy was sitting in his kitchen, hands clasped around a mug of tea. It had been colder than he’d realised outside, and by the time he’d got the bin back down the path, he was freezing. Robbie had promised to make sure that the new driver swung back down Jimmy’s road when they finished their round on the estate, but Jimmy doubted the new driver would say yes. It was an unwritten rule that whoever was driving was in charge, mostly because he—or occasionally she—would be earning more than the others because they had a license. Jimmy couldn’t see the miserable bastard of a driver giving in to Robbie.

  On the table in front of Jimmy was a black plastic bag, tied shut with a dainty double bow like a pair of child’s shoelaces. That was the way Milly had always tied her rubbish bags, much to Jimmy’s amusement. He’d asked her once, several years ago, why she was so precise about tying them that way.

  ‘Because it’s neat and tidy,’ she’d told him. That was Milly all over, Jimmy thought with a smile. Even though it was a bag of rubbish, it was neat and tidy.

  He put his mug down on the table and reached out to one of the loose ends of the bow. He knew that when he pulled it, the knot would come undone. He also knew that when the knot was undone, something that Milly had created would have been destroyed. With a scowl, he yanked at the plastic bag, tearing it open but leaving the knot intact.

  The contents of the bin liner spilled out onto the kitchen table. Jimmy knew that the only things in it would be paper, cardboard, or dry stuff. Milly wouldn’t use the bin in her room for anything that might go mouldy, or smell. This wasn’t about her being neat and tidy, Jimmy knew, but it meant that she didn’t have to empty it as often.

  Jimmy picked up his tea and took a sip as he regarded what had fallen out of the bag and onto the kitchen table. Just as he had thought, the vast majority of it was paper. He prodded at the pile, starting to separate it out into piles. On one side was rubbish. Wrappers, cardboard tampon inserts, empty envelopes. On the other side, Jimmy organised various pieces of balled up paper. He unwrapped a few of them—receipts, mostly. Amongst the rest of the rubbish was a whole load of shredded paper, each piece cut into small squares only a few millimetres on each side. He frowned, not understanding why the shredded paper was in Milly’s bin. There wasn’t a shredder in her room, but they had one in the tiny utility room off their kitchen. But why would Milly shred paper and then take it upstairs and put it into her own bin? Or did she have another shredder somewhere?

  He was on his third cup of tea when he decided that the pile of rubbish was properly sorted. He swept the largest of the three piles in front of him into a fresh bin bag. Into this bag went all the stuff that was rubbish—all the food wrappers, the envelopes with their transparent windows, and the cardboard. The next largest pile he swept carefully into a sandwich bag. This was the shredding. Jimmy had no idea what Milly had shredded, but the fact that she’d made the effort to dispose of it in her own bin made it interesting to him, so he decided to hang on to it. The last pile—and the one that was the most interesting to Jimmy—was the balled-up paper. Most of it, as far as he could tell, was receipts but there were a few larger pieces of screwed up paper in amongst them. He pushed the larger bits to one side and concentrated initially on the receipts.

  Smoothing each one out, he carefully put them into date order. Some of them he discarded straight away, throwing them into the bag with the wrappers. The only thing on these receipts was food, drinks, and other inconsequential purchases that wouldn’t tell him anything. Once he had organised them the way he wanted them, he started going back through them starting with the most recent.

  Within a few moments, Jimmy realised that this was a pointless exercise. There was nothing in the receipts that jumped out at him. It was all, well, just normal stuff. Makeup. Toiletries. Clothes. Nothing unusual at all. There were a few receipts from Boots the Chemist that didn’t have itemised lists of purchases, but just codes. Jimmy separated these out, not sure if they would be useful or not. He’d not been in Boots for years, other than for emergency Christmas presents, but knowing what the purchases were might be useful. On the other hand, Jimmy thought as he looked at the other receipts that listed the items that Milly had bought, they might not.

  He turned his attention to the larger balls of paper and picked one out. Smoothing it out on the kitchen table, Jimmy squinted to read the small print on the A4 sized sheet. According to the letter, Milly had been pre-selected for a credit card with a limit of ten grand. No credit check required.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ Jimmy muttered under his breath. ‘No wonder all the kids are in debt.’ Milly was livi
ng at home, not earning much in the taxman’s eyes according to Malcolm, and was being offered an easy ten thousand pounds of credit. Jimmy looked at the addressee in the top corner of the letter and realised that it was addressed not to Milly, but to someone called “Nikki Apollonia” who—according to the letter—lived with them in their ex-council house. ‘For fuck’s sake, Milly,’ Jimmy whispered under his breath. ‘What are you up to?’

  With a deep sigh, Jimmy reached out for another crumpled sheet of paper. He flattened it out on the kitchen table, expecting it to be another piece of junk mail for someone who didn’t exist. It was A4 size, made of thin paper, with the words “Things to do today” printed across the top of the page in white letters on a navy blue background. There was a small box in the top left-hand corner marked “date”, where Milly had written in her familiar capital letters the word “TODAY”. Below the header was a series of lines, each with a number and a small circle on either side. The list was perhaps half filled out, each line in Milly’s neat capitals.

  He scanned down the list, flicking his eyes across to the circles to see what Milly had marked as completed. It was full of abbreviations—phrases like “Speak to GK about TR” and “Get cash from TT”. Jimmy grabbed his notebook from the counter and started scribbling down the abbreviations. All the entries apart from the last one had neat ticks next to them. He worked his way down the list, stopping briefly on one of them that looked interesting. “Pick up dress for RH from MS.” Was RH a person, perhaps? MS could be a shop—Miss Selfridge? Marks and Spencers? Jimmy wasn’t sure either of them sold dresses like the ones Milly had in her wardrobe, but it was something he could look at.

  When he got to the last entry on the list—the only one without a tick next to it—a band tightened around his chest. Why had Milly ripped the page from her pad without putting a tick next to it?

  “Tell Dad I love him.”

  Chapter 23

  Jimmy stood underneath the orange and white striped awning of a clothes shop in the centre of Norwich, looking at the photographic studio on the other side of the street. He was in Elm Hill—one of the oldest streets in Norwich—but the building opposite was a stark contrast to the higgledy-piggledy medieval buildings around him.

  The studio was in a modern glass-fronted building, bookended by a pub and yet another clothes shop. Both the pub and the clothes shop looked very old to Jimmy, which made the photographic studio stand out even more. Medieval architecture wasn’t Jimmy’s strong point by a long way, but even he realised that the building opposite was horrendous. How anyone had got planning permission to build it was beyond him, but build it they had. As he watched shoppers hurrying by to escape the light rain, he wondered what had originally been in the gap between the two older buildings, and why they just hadn’t rebuilt it. He vaguely remembered a history lesson at school—well over forty years ago—about Norwich being bombed by the Germans in the Second World War. Elm Hill had been hit several times—perhaps that explained the mismatched buildings?

  According to the sign on the door that Jimmy had seen thirty minutes earlier, the studio was going to re-open after lunch at any minute. He’d been glad of the thirty minutes as it gave him time to have a quick bite to eat in the pub next to the studio. He’d only had a cheese and onion baguette and half a pint of lager, but it had hit the spot nicely.

  Jimmy looked up and down the cobbled street, trying to identify whoever was going to open the door so he could get a good look at them before he had to actually have a conversation with them. In the end, he got caught out. The next time he looked at the glass door of the studio, a young woman was standing in front of it, fiddling with a set of keys.

  Jimmy watched as she opened the door and went in, shaking her umbrella onto the cobblestones before closing the door. He could see her through the windows, shrugging herself out of her coat and hanging it up before leaning the umbrella up against the wall. The woman looked to Jimmy as if she was perhaps mid-thirties, carrying quite a few extra pounds, and with a shock of unruly bright purple dyed hair. He was surprised he’d missed the hair until he realised that it must have been hidden by the umbrella when she walked down the street. It really was bright, Jimmy thought as he watched the woman take her place behind a desk near the front door. So was she the photographer? Or the receptionist?

  He pulled the small USB drive out of his pocket and looked at the printed logo on the side of the device. It matched the logo above the window he was looking at, just as it had done when he’d checked a few moments before, so he knew he was in the right place. Thinking about the conversation ahead, he slipped the drive back into his pocket where it clinked against his lighter. Jimmy reached into his pocket and retrieved the drive, swapping it to the other pocket so that it didn’t scratch the casing of the lighter. He knew it would be the other way round if anything, and that even if it did scratch the Zippo no-one would know anyway, but that wasn’t the point. A moment later, he took a deep breath and made his way carefully over the slippery cobblestones.

  ‘Afternoon,’ the woman said in a bright voice as Jimmy pushed the door open and walked into the studio. Jimmy smiled at her as he returned the greeting. She was younger than he’d originally thought, more twenties than thirties, and Jimmy noticed that one reason for the unruly hair was to hide some unfortunate acne scarring on her forehead. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘Um, I’d like to get some photographs done,’ Jimmy replied, looking around. The interior of the studio was not unlike a hospital waiting room—all it had were seats and low tables with a few magazines on them. The studio itself must be through one of the closed doors that led off the waiting area. The woman returned Jimmy’s smile.

  ‘Excellent, have a seat and I’ll get some details.’ She shuffled in a drawer for a pad while Jimmy sat at the empty seat in front of the desk. While he waited, Jimmy looked around the walls of the waiting area. They were covered in canvases, obviously what the studio thought was their best work. ‘It’s foul out, isn’t it?’

  ‘Horrible,’ Jimmy replied, looking away from a canvas featuring an impossibly happy looking young couple. ‘If it’s going to rain, I wish it would just rain properly instead of this drizzle nonsense.’

  ‘I know,’ the woman said, looking suspiciously at a biro that was on the desk. She attempted to scribble something on the pad, looking relieved when it worked. ‘It just kind of hangs around at head-height, and before you know it, you’re soaked.’

  With the obligatory conversation about the weather over, the woman introduced herself as Rachel. Max—the photographer—was away with a client, but she was expecting him back any minute. Jimmy waited while she tapped out a quick text on her phone to let Max know that he had a customer waiting.

  ‘So,’ she said, putting the phone down on the desk and smiling at Jimmy. ‘Maybe I could take some details?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jimmy replied, pausing for a second to rehearse his cover story. ‘I have a friend who’s interested in becoming a model. She’d like to get some pictures for, er…’ He stopped, realising that he’d forgotten the word. ‘Her folder?’ he finished limply.

  ‘Her portfolio?’ Rachel asked. ‘Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jimmy smiled. ‘Her portfolio.’

  ‘Okay, that sounds great. How old is she?’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  ‘Excellent. And what type of modelling does she want to get into?’

  Jimmy paused for a second before replying. He’d not expected that question. Modelling was modelling, wasn’t it?

  ‘All sorts.’

  ‘All sorts?’

  ‘Yeah, bit of everything. You know,’ Jimmy said, trying to sound confident.

  ’Sure, sure,’ Rachel replied, scribbling something on her note pad. ‘And she’s a friend?’ He paused again. This wasn’t going well. People his age didn’t have young female friends in their twenties, by and large. Jimmy thought quickly for a better response.

  ‘Kind of. She works for me.’


  ‘Oh, I see,’ Rachel said, looking at Jimmy. He saw her eyes flick to the side of his head and he realised that she’d clocked the bruising. ‘What line of work are you in, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘Er, security,’ Jimmy replied. He silently congratulated himself on the response. ‘Security,’ he repeated, more confidently this time as he pointed at the side of his head. ‘Thought that would have been obvious from my face.’

  ‘Got it,’ Rachel said, smiling at him uncertainly. ‘Max shouldn’t be long. Have a look round, if you want?’ She waved at the canvases on the wall with her pen.

  Jimmy got the hint and stood, thanking Rachel with the nicest smile he could muster. He wandered over to the other side of the waiting area, glancing at the magazines on the coffee tables. They were all photographic magazines, so not that much like a hospital waiting area. There wasn’t a single copy of a word puzzle magazine in sight.

  On the wall at the far end of the room were three large canvases. They were, Jimmy had to admit, pretty good. On the left was a closeup of a woman’s face taken through a veil of some sort. It took Jimmy a few seconds to realise that it was a wedding photograph, artfully done. On the right-hand side was a dark, brooding photograph of a teenage boy’s head and shoulders. A guitar fret was leaning against his arm as he stared moodily into the middle distance. Both photographs were full of promise, Jimmy thought. One light and airy, one full of foreboding, but both full of hopeful promise of things to come, regardless. Jimmy wondered if the effect was intentional as he turned his attention to the middle canvas, the larger of the three by some distance.