Sight Unseen

by Graham Hurley

  ‘This is a car crash,’ he says. ‘What are you holding back? What haven’t you told me?’

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. You’re supposed to be an actress, for fuck’s sake. If this was an audition, it wouldn’t matter, but that woman is walking all over you. She knows you’re hiding something, which is why she’s being so fucking unpleasant. Do us a favour here … just give me a clue?’

  I sit down. I don’t know what to say. This isn’t good.

  ‘Well?’ Tony is tapping his watch.

  ‘H never told you?’

  ‘Told me what?’

  ‘Told you about Clem?’

  ‘Clem? Never heard of her.’

  ‘She’s Malo’s girlfriend. And about a week ago she got kidnapped.’

  ‘Kidnapped? You’re serious?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And the police? Do they know?’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘I’m afraid they don’t.’

  THIRTY-SIX

  Tony insists I go ‘no comment’ for the rest of the interview. He plainly doesn’t trust me at the hands of these professionals and as the two detectives begin to crowd me across the desk, pecking away at this story of mine, I find a strange sense of satisfaction in parrying their every question with the same response.

  I know, in Tony’s eyes, that I have a great deal of ground to make up, and as the interview gets longer and more disjointed I begin to toy with differences of inflection. In response to some questions, the most innocuous, I’m downcast and a little sotto voce. ‘No comment,’ I murmur. To others, when Carrie Martin is being especially aggressive, I play it full-on, max allegretto, an up-beat, almost joyful ‘No comment’ that I know gets under her skin. This little phrase, my own solicitor once told me, is a killer in any conversation and so it proves.

  DC Chaulk ends the interview at just gone ten o’clock and retires to conference with the detective inspector in charge of the investigation. The conversation evidently takes far longer than it should, which is not, in Tony’s view, a good sign. DC Chaulk returns to the interview room and then walks me down to the custody sergeant. I’m not, as yet, to be formally charged with the preparation of a controlled drug for injection but the detective inspector, an officer we now call the SIO, is insisting on police bail, which apparently means I must resign myself to an eternity of reporting regularly to this same police station in a bid to stop me fleeing the country.

  It’s gone midnight. We’re in Tony’s BMW, driving back to Flixcombe. Lost in a thicket of legal terms I don’t begin to understand, I’m trying to guess what might happen next.

  ‘They’ll carry on looking.’ Tony has succumbed to a small, thin cigar. ‘They have confession evidence that you helped our little friend with crack cocaine and then heroin, but they think there’s more in your pot. Had they charged you, they couldn’t put any more questions. Doing it this way, they can.’

  ‘More interviews?’

  ‘Very possibly. It depends. The one thing in our favour is that the men in blue are running on empty. Their budgets have been slashed and slashed and we should know how that feels because the Home Office has done the same to us. Johnny Plod has run out of budget. He’s very thin on the ground. People are beginning to notice and that makes them very nervous. The county lines thing is the perfect storm. It’s where the rubber no longer meets the road. The truth is that the police have lost it, lost the battle on the streets, but you’re high profile. If they can get a headline or two out of you, so much the better. Sadly that’s not in our favour. If they can put you in court, they will.’

  I nod. I think I’m following the logic here. ‘And if that happens? If they charge me? Drag me in front of a magistrate? A jury? What then?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘But I just did.’

  Tony nods. I sense he’s trying to protect me but just now I’d like him to be frank.

  I reach across and put a hand on his thigh. ‘Just tell me,’ I say.

  ‘OK.’ He nods, then expels a thin plume of blue smoke. ‘Crack cocaine? Smack? Both Class A substances? Possession – you’re looking at up to seven years. Supply and production? Life. There’s something else, too. They’ll do a PM.’

  ‘PM?’

  ‘Post-mortem. If the tox says paralysis due to Class A ingestion they’ll arrest you again.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Manslaughter.’

  Manslaughter? A life sentence for supply? Christ. It isn’t Noodle who’s died, it’s me. Tony has been quick to qualify the sentencing tariffs with all kinds of extenuating circumstances but he doesn’t hide the seriousness of the situation I’ve made for myself. In all kinds of ways, he repeats, I couldn’t have chosen a worse moment to put my fading celebrity on the line. No matter how genuine my motives might have been in that sad little tent, I’m offering the media and the politicians a loaded gun. Actress in drug-death mystery. Murder or assisted suicide? The headlines write themselves.

  H, to my huge relief, offers nothing but sympathy. Jessie opens the door to Tony’s knock and H is waiting up for our return in the library. Sprawled in his favourite armchair, a huge balloon of brandy at his elbow, he struggles to his feet and puts his arms around me. Two search teams have spent most of the afternoon and the evening going through the house. Both cars, his and mine, have been taken away for detailed examination. But so far, he says, the Filth have come up with nothing and far more importantly he knows they never will.

  ‘All that white powder bollocks is history as far as I’m concerned,’ he tells me. ‘It did us very nicely back in the day but enough is enough. Thank fuck for booze.’

  He sends Jessie out to the kitchen for more glasses and then pours huge measures of Armagnac for us all. Andy, Jess confirms, has buried a week’s supply of weed where no one will ever find it. H proposes the usual toast – death to the Filth – and we all settle down. I’m waiting for Tony to break the news about the charge I may well be facing. So far he hasn’t said a word but H is watching him closely. The two of them, to my knowledge, go back decades. Tony Morse is one of the few people H will ever listen to.

  ‘Well?’ This from H.

  Tony does more than justice to the evening’s developments. Yours truly, in his view, has done something very bold and very silly. He’s full of admiration for my motherly instincts but he fears they’re wasted on the men in blue. Last night has left me a sitting duck for the guys in power trying to protect their arse. If I go down for drugs offences, or for complicity in someone’s death, then it will buy the chief constables and the senior honchos in the Home Office just an ounce of self-respect because a sentence like that, widely reported, will be proof that the battle for the streets, and for the nation’s kids, isn’t quite lost.

  I smile, then get up and take a bow. ‘Not my finest hour,’ I murmur, ‘mais je ne regrette rien.’

  Tony supplies the translation. H applauds. He tells me he’s proud of me. Paying a couple of junkies a visit at one in the morning isn’t something any man would do lightly, let alone a woman. It’s just a shame, he said, to waste all this effort on someone like Malo.

  ‘You’ve talked to him?’

  ‘He’s upstairs.’

  ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘Yeah. The boy came crawling back this evening. Brassic. We had a little chat.’

  ‘About Clem? He told you what he’s been up to?’

  ‘No. He still won’t budge.’

  ‘And the gun? He’s still got it?’

  ‘Yeah. I took it off him. His gangster days are fucking over. There’s something else you should know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It turns out the trip to Lyon to see the French guys was a car crash. They’re not interested any more. He would have told me earlier but he said he was frightened.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Me.’ H shrugs. ‘He’ll be fine by tomorrow. Once he starts growing up.’

  My temptation is to head for the door,
run up to Malo’s little suite of rooms and check he’s still intact, but I manage to resist it. Tony wants to know about Clem.

  ‘You’ve told him about Clemmie?’ H is staring at me.

  Tony intervenes. ‘She had no choice,’ he tells H. ‘You never send a soldier into battle without bullets. This was worse. Enora was being torn apart by a very clever detective. This woman knew she was looking at the mother lode but couldn’t work out what it contained. Enora was on the verge of coughing the lot but I managed to call a break. After that, I could load my gun and see them off.’

  ‘She went no comment?’

  ‘She did. But no thanks to you, my friend. Manslaughter isn’t something we should take lightly. The Class A tariff is a nightmare. Pervert the course of justice and you could be looking at something even worse.’

  ‘You think that’s what we’re doing?’

  ‘Not me. Them. Kidnap’s up there with homicide and arson. If you’re going to get this Clem lady back it needs to be done quickly.’

  ‘Else?’

  ‘They’ll build the case against Enora and take her to court. Clem home safe and sound will be the sweetest mitigation ever.’ Tony’s hand settles on mine as he turns to look at me. ‘You were out of your head with worry. You put yourself in harm’s way to get her back. The video’s already out there. We’ve seen it. The pub? The bloody car park? The tent? The kid’s body on the beach? Play it right and it could be the movie of your dreams.’

  H is grinning. Jessie, too. Looking at Tony, I’m full of admiration. A speech like that in court would play very nicely indeed. Only one problem, I think.

  Clem.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  It’s Tuesday, more than a week beyond the ransom deadline, and breakfast at Flixcombe Manor quickly develops into a council of war. Tony has already made a call to his office back in Pompey and rearranged his diary. One of the other partners, he says, will cover him in the magistrates’ court and he can catch up with everything else later. Watching him watching H, I sense he doesn’t entirely trust either us or our judgement and on the evidence of the last few days, I don’t blame him.

  Jessie is ferrying plates of eggs and bacon to the table. She brings a moment of light relief when she describes a member of yesterday’s search team finding a stash of spent ammunition in the barn. H, she said, blamed an infestation of killer hamsters and when that didn’t raise a laugh he changed his plea to rats.

  ‘They’re still trying to work it out,’ H grunts. ‘Never waste a joke on the Filth.’

  This happens to be the moment when Malo joins us in the kitchen. He looks terrible and when I cross the room and offer a hug, he backs away. Jess’s suggestion of scrambled egg on toast draws a shake of the head. He says he feels like shit. He’d spent his last few quid on tablets that were meant to help him sleep but they haven’t worked. All he wants is to close his eyes and find Clem in the bed upstairs. It’s a pathetic little speech, delivered in a toneless mumble, and does him no justice. H doesn’t even spare him a glance. That bad.

  Malo’s gone and Tony wants to know the plan. All eyes turn to H. He’s looking at Tony.

  ‘So we don’t go to the police, right?’

  ‘Right. And I’m not part of this. I never knew.’

  ‘You never did. That happens to be true. Because I never fucking told you.’

  ‘Good. But this has to be quick. Speed matters. So where do you think she is?’

  This is the killer question and H knows it. In every conversation he has to be top dog. He has to wee on every lamp post. He has to own everything, know everything. But on this occasion he’s clueless. Literally.

  ‘London,’ he says. ‘It has to be London.’

  Tony is underwhelmed and it shows. London, he points out, is a big place. Just where might H start?

  H says he has an address for the Somalis. He and Wes went there only a couple of nights ago. This is the doss in Brixton where Malo paid a visit. The address Larry Fab gave them.

  ‘And?’

  ‘They saw us off. Big time.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We talked our way in. That wasn’t a problem. The smell, stench, was unbelievable. Mr Dreads was there and we were trying to have a quiet word but then a huge Somali guy off his head on fuck knows what arrives. Just appears from nowhere. Naked apart from a pair of kecks. With a machete? And the animals behind him? Working out which bits of us to eat first? You have to be joking. There are times and places and that wasn’t one of them.’

  ‘You left?’

  ‘We did. Even Wes was glad to be out of there. And for the record, I’m thinking Mateo is right. You don’t mess with these guys. They think the world’s there for the taking and I can’t see anyone stopping them. That’s why the Somalis make such great pirates. They never know their place.’

  I can sense a sneaking admiration in H’s voice and Tony’s caught it, too. It’s not just O’Keefe who’s been overtaken by the giddy pace of change in the criminal milieu. It’s H, as well.

  ‘You think Clem might have been in that house? Flat? Whatever it was?’ I ask H.

  ‘I’ve no idea. But Mateo’s certain they’re the key.’

  I explain Mateo to Tony Morse. Clem’s dad. Very big interests in Bogotá. Currently camping in a squillion-pound-a-month rental in Eaton Square. Very civilized and probably very clever.

  H smiles. ‘Top bloke,’ he says.

  Tony’s nodding. I get the feeling he’s glimpsed a flicker of light in the darkness. Someone sane. Someone wealthy. Someone with the biggest stake of all in his daughter’s safe return. The only problem is that Mateo, as H readily admits, is a bit of a loner. H is looking at me. It’s my liberty potentially at stake here and he needs to know how to bring this affair to a happy end without months of negotiation.

  I’m thinking hard about the woman I met yesterday, the figure who ghosted out of the trees at Lockett’s Copse and warned me off any mistake on my part that might implicate The Machine. Last night, I made sure Brodie’s name never surfaced, not once, and in that one single instance I played a blinder and kept my word. The Machine will probably know that, because no one’s come knocking at his door.

  An actress, I think. Who recently guested on EastEnders.

  ‘Give me ten minutes.’ I’m looking at H. ‘Then I’ll be back.’

  I phone my agent, Rosa, from the privacy of my bedroom. Her assistant, Fran, says she’s really busy with the accountant but I manage to get her to put me through.

  ‘Bloody VAT,’ Rosa says at once. ‘Who needs it?’

  I tell her I’m after a name and ideally an address. Failing that, getting to this woman’s agent might be useful.

  ‘What woman?’

  I give Rosa the clues, which I admit are sparse. Mention of her height and her colour and above all her hair, coupled with her recent outing in EastEnders, trigger a memory or two. Rosa has never met this woman herself but she knows who to call.

  ‘Very bad girl,’ she laughs. ‘If you were married you’d never let her past the gate. If I’ve got the right woman, men who should know better can’t keep their hands off her.’

  This sounds not just promising but slightly ironic. According to Jessie, it’s The Machine who gets molested.

  ‘You’ll phone me back?’

  ‘I will, precious. You’re sounding, if I may say so, slightly anxious. Is everything OK?’

  ‘No, far from it.’

  I know Rosa thrives on gossip and would like nothing better than a longer break from the VAT return but when she gently presses me for more details I ask her to be patient.

  ‘One day I’ll tell you everything,’ I promise, ‘but just now it’s bloody impossible. The woman’s name, please. Quick as you can.’

  She phones back within the hour. I’m at the sink with Jessie in the kitchen, half-listening to H earbashing Tony Morse. He thinks it’s time Malo got a grip on himself. He’s given the boy lots of opportunities and most of the time he’s more than risen to the chall
enge. Lately, though, he’s gone back to being a moody adolescent and H has had enough.

  Now H is wondering whether a spell of work experience with Tony’s lot might do the trick. Tony spends most of his professional life dealing with the wreckage of Pompey’s underclass – feral kids who have fallen through every conceivable safety net – and maybe Malo needs to see what happens when lives come off the rails. It needn’t cost Tony a cent. H, as Dad, will foot the bills. Just tie the boy down. And show him a bit of real life.

  Tony is non-committal and I don’t blame him. He’s suggesting that Malo might benefit from a spell with one of the Third World charities when my phone rings. I dry my hands. Rosa, I think.

  ‘Ready, precious? Got a pen there?’

  Tony produces a sleek Montblanc ballpoint. I borrow H’s copy of the Daily Mail. It’s open at one of the sports pages at the back. In the space above a piece predicting Mourinho’s downfall at Old Trafford, I write a name. Baptiste Woodruffe. I stare at it a moment, then check with Rosa that I’ve got it right. This is really what the woman calls herself?

  ‘This week, precious? For sure. That’s what I’m told. My source is impeccable and you’re going to owe her a very large drink because there’s more.’

  She gives me a mobile number. I want to know where she lives.

  ‘I gather that depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On her private life. There’s lots of it, lots and lots. Just now she’s spending time in the West Country but my lovely friend says she’s also got a place in town. You want to hear something really funny? She spent three days on the EastEnders set and caused such chaos they had to write her out after her first appearance. That set is a boot camp. They don’t put up with any nonsense. The lovely Baptiste? She trampled them underfoot. Good luck, precious. Take care.’

  About to ring off, she tells me that my interview with the French producers in Paris has been postponed a couple of weeks. Their fault, not ours. No problema. Then she’s gone.

  H and Tony have been watching me on the phone. H wants to know what’s going on. I tell him I’ve been talking to my agent. He taps the name I’ve carefully written on his newspaper.