You Will Never Find Me

by Robert Wilson

  He performed a Neanderthal two-step which suddenly went horribly awry and sent her into giggles. He came up close to her, his head at the height of her chin. He looked up, eyes penetrating right into her. The nerve of him. Ugly bugger too. She had to bring all of her London cool to bear, and he saw that he’d have to make another push.

  ‘You know where I’m from?’ he said.

  She wanted to say ‘the movies’ but didn’t want to throw herself at him. He didn’t seem to be local.

  ‘Madrid?’ she said, ironic. He came in closer.

  ‘Col-om-bia.’

  He saw the light come on in her face and knew what it meant.

  ‘Te gusta un poco de nieve,’ he said, laughing. ‘You like a little snow.’

  He thumped his breast pocket with the side of his fist. Smiled.

  ‘We have enough to go skiing.’

  That did it for her. No need to sell the passport. No need to haggle in the toilets. Free charlie the whole night through. He held out his arm. She took it. His friends couldn’t believe it. They came over and slapped hundred-euro notes into his hand, which seemed to her like a lot of money for a bet.

  They went to Le Cock and drank mojitos, snorted a couple of lines each and then moved to a nightclub called Charada, where house music was the name of the game. They danced for half an hour and then went to the toilets for another line. He kissed her. She kissed him back. He put a strong hard hand between her legs and felt the heat coming off her. The music thumped through the walls.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Como te llamas?’ he said. ‘You ask me: Como te llamas?’

  She tried as he sawed his hand over her crotch.

  ‘Me llamo Carlos,’ he said. ‘But nobody calls me that.’

  ‘What do they call you?’ she asked, her stomach wrestling under the red dress with the persistence of his hand beneath.

  ‘They call me El Osito,’ he said, his eyes darkening and narrowing to blade points.

  ‘And what’s an osito?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a little bear,’ he said, and withdrawing his massive hand from between her legs, held it up to the dim light, ‘con una pata grande.’

  2

  11:30 P.M., SATURDAY 17TH MARCH 2012

  Mercy Danquah’s house, Streatham, London

  But it’s weird . . . this need she has to justify her actions,’ said Boxer. ‘You wouldn’t have thought she’d bother. “I’m out of here. Don’t come looking for me. Bye.” That’s all it needed.’

  ‘It’s personal,’ said Mercy shrewdly. ‘Handwritten.’

  They were in the sitting room, Amy’s note on the coffee table between them.

  Boxer leaned forward to reread it without touching it, looking for other levels of meaning, unable to restrain his professionalism. Both of them were used to reading and listening to notes, texts and messages sent by gangs and putting them through a special analysis, but this time there was added parental guilt, anger and denial.

  ‘She’s being rational and organised. She’s getting her PR in place. She left here, went to the police station and told the desk sergeant he’d recognise me.’

  ‘When was the last time you were at that police station?’

  ‘Never been there in my life. She was just winding up the desk sergeant and sticking it to me at the same time. Telling him we’re both coppers so we should feel right at home with each other,’ said Mercy. ‘Did you know she had a driving licence?’

  ‘No. I asked her if she’d like to learn, thinking I’d pay for some lessons as a birthday present. “And what would I do with a car in London?” she said. “Who’s going to buy me one? Who’s going to insure it?” All in that withering, patronising way of hers. I’m not sure how much of this is to do with us,’ said Boxer, irritated by the defensiveness that even he could hear in his own voice. ‘It’s convenient to blame us: the people who’d had the temerity to bring her into this godforsaken world. And she has a go, as you’d expect . . . but almost as an afterthought. “It bores me being a child, your child.” What’s more striking to me is her despair at the way her life is unfolding. She seems to want to jolt herself out of the predictability, of knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow.’

  ‘And yet there’s something in that last line that smacks of . . . a challenge.’

  ‘I’m with you on that. She’s definitely throwing down the gauntlet to us, the professionals, to come looking for her.’

  ‘And she’s arrogant enough to think we’re not going to hack it.’

  ‘Do you think there’s part of her that wants to be found?’

  ‘Why challenge people if you don’t?’ said Mercy.

  ‘Maybe she just couldn’t resist goading us. She knew, because we’re the people we are, that we were going to be on her case from the moment we saw that note. This is her saying, “You haven’t got a chance.”’

  ‘Do you think she’s laid down some elaborate smokescreen to make us look like idiots at our own work?’

  The doorbell rang. Mercy left the room and returned with two police officers and an eyebrow raised to Boxer. They were not friendly. The expected professional bond was not there, but rather the ‘suspect distance’.

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Weaver,’ said the male officer, taking in the couple in front of him: a tall slim black woman with cropped hair and almond-shaped eyes and a blond-haired man with intense green eyes who looked as if he kept himself in fighting condition.

  ‘And I’m Detective Sergeant Jones,’ said the female officer.

  ‘We’d like to see Amy’s room,’ said Weaver.

  ‘And the note,’ said Jones, staring down at the coffee table.

  Boxer handed it over. The note passed between the officers.

  They all went up to Amy’s room.

  ‘Have you established what she’s taken with her?’

  ‘Well, as you can see, there’s nothing in here. She’s stripped it bare.’

  ‘Without you noticing anything?’ asked Jones.

  ‘I’ve been working on a very demanding case this last week and she was supposed to be staying with her grandmother up in Hampstead. But clearly she was dropping in here after school and removing all her stuff,’ said Mercy. ‘Tonight was her first night back home. She said she would join us at a restaurant in town but didn’t show. I came back, checked her room, found the note.’

  ‘I understand from the desk sergeant that you saw Amy when she left the house this afternoon,’ said Jones.

  ‘She had a small rucksack, that was it.’

  Mercy described what Amy had been wearing. The officers didn’t take notes. They asked for all the details of friends and relatives, the places Amy was known to frequent, her money situation. Mercy talked them through it but omitted Amy’s involvement in the previous weekend’s cigarette smuggling jaunt between the Canaries and London that she’d uncovered. She wanted to investigate that little scenario herself. She told them what she knew about Amy’s finances—that she had a debit card and a bank account but didn’t know how much she had in it.

  ‘We’ll need some up-to-date photos,’ said Weaver. ‘And er . . . a DNA sample would be helpful. Hair? A toothbrush?’

  Mercy was momentarily frozen by this: the possibility that they might have to match DNA with a body. She gave Boxer a curious glance, which he didn’t understand, and went to the corner of the room where she knew Amy dried and brushed her hair, but not a single strand of her long ringlets remained.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ said Mercy. ‘She’s hoovered the room.’ ‘Let’s go back downstairs for the next bit,’ said Weaver. ‘And we’ll check the vacuum cleaner while we’re at it.’

  In the kitchen Mercy gave them the vacuum cleaner but the bag had been changed. Mercy blinked at the thoroughness. She offered tea and coffee, which were politely refused. They reconv
ened in the living room. Boxer and Mercy sat. The policemen stood in front of the fireplace.

  ‘What we need to talk about now is any . . . er . . . events that you can think of that might have been a factor in Amy wanting to leave home,’ said Weaver.

  ‘She’s always been a strong, determined girl, but she was very sweet and loving until some sort of hormonal explosion at fourteen, when she went up to her room as one sort of person and came down the following morning as another. That crisis has deepened over the years, to the point of continuous antipathy towards me in particular—seeing as we are the ones living together—and Charlie whenever she has the opportunity. But no, there wasn’t a specific incident,’ said Mercy.

  Weaver and Jones turned their hard faces to Boxer.

  ‘Look,’ said Boxer, open-palmed, ‘I’m not going to paint myself as totally blameless. I’ve been an absent father much of the time. I had a job that took me out of the country for more than half the year.’

  ‘What job was that?’

  ‘I was a kidnap consultant with GRM, a big private security company, running negotiations all over the world, but I’m freelance now. Amy was becoming too much of a handful for Mercy to manage alone with the kind of job she has. I left the company nearly two years ago so that I could choose my work to fit in with spending more time with my daughter. I’ve developed a relationship with another company called Pavis Risk Management, who give me as much contract work as I want.’

  ‘And you’re in the kidnap unit with Specialist Crime Directorate 7 under DCS Makepeace?’ said Weaver, turning to Mercy.

  ‘It’s a time-consuming job with uncertain hours. I’ve done my best to look after Amy, and when work’s got in the way I’ve sent her to family members living here in south London or to Charlie’s mother in Hampstead.’

  ‘Did you ever hit your daughter?’

  ‘No,’ said Boxer emphatically.

  The two officers looked at Mercy, who was saying nothing.

  ‘Ms. Danquah?’

  ‘I hit her once, yes,’ said Mercy.

  This was news to Boxer.

  ‘And what were the circumstances, Ms. Danquah?’ asked Jones.

  ‘Just before last Christmas, school had finished. She stayed out all night. She didn’t call on Sunday morning even. Her friend Karen, who’d been with her that night, had lost sight of her in a place called Basing House in Shoreditch. She was last seen dancing with a black couple with bleached-blonde hair. I was worried sick, calling her and texting her. I even ran down the management of Basing House, who were surprisingly understanding and told me to call the police. Then at two o’clock, Sunday afternoon, she breezes back in here as if she’s been for an after-lunch stroll in the park, with that “no worries” look on her face. I was beside myself. Relieved but totally furious. And of course Amy knows how to do it to me. She saw my state and knew she was to blame so she wound me up and I blew. I slapped her once, hard, across the face, which at that point was being dangled in front of me, just daring me to do it. And she knew that where I come from, a very strict Ghanaian upbringing, my father beat us all the time, and it wasn’t just slaps across the face, it was canes across the back, buttocks and legs. And that was for getting seven out of ten in a spelling test, not staying out all night in a club in Shoreditch.’

  Weaver and Jones were transfixed. This was no performance. They knew London kids and the extremes they could take you to.

  ‘And I was sorry,’ said Mercy. ‘I was sorry for what I’d done, because when I’d suffered at my father’s hands I promised myself that I would never do the same to a child of mine. And there I was smacking her. I grovelled. I begged for forgiveness. The look I got back from her was one of total triumph. She slammed her bedroom door in my face.’

  ‘In the letter she left at the station the reasons she gave for leaving home were “excessive discipline and harsh treatment with occasional violence”,’ said Weaver.

  ‘And the word abuse cropped up a few times,’ said Jones. Mercy blurted an incredulous laugh, the emotion uncontainable.

  ‘Abuse?’ she said. ‘Amy doesn’t know the meaning of the word. She should see what I’ve seen on the estates in Stockwell and Brixton.’

  Boxer put an arm around Mercy’s shoulders, felt her trembling, the lava boiling in the maternal pit.

  ‘I wanted to take Mercy out of the line of fire,’ said Boxer. ‘Amy’s campaigns were relentless. The more she realised how much she could hurt Mercy the more inventive she became. But Amy’s never lived with me. I didn’t have the home or the life to offer that alternative.

  ‘I’m sure you two have seen a few things in your time around here in south London—the teenage knifings. I was in the Gulf War before I did a few years as a homicide detective. Mercy has done twenty years in the police—beat, murder and kidnap. All that experience counts for nothing when you come up against the arrogance of youth. They think because of the marvellous connectivity of their brave new world that they miraculously know everything, even without having faced it, and that all we’re doing, as their parents, is laying down unnecessary boundaries to contain their natural enthusiasm for life. They don’t know what we know.’

  ‘You’re making it sound as if running away might give her some useful work experience,’ said Jones.

  ‘But we know she’s not equipped for it. She can be clever and manipulative in her own world and be successful. She’s experimented with Mercy as her lab rat. But put her out there in real life and she won’t cut it. People will take one look and see an opportunity. For all this so-called “excessive discipline” she’s actually been wrapped in cotton wool.’

  ‘That’s what you think,’ said Weaver, ‘but you don’t seem to know too much about her. The driving licence?’

  ‘She’s secretive. We’re busy,’ said Boxer.

  ‘Maybe if you’d spent more time with her?’ said Weaver, which earned him a look from Jones. Weaver had kids and, even on the way here, he’d been whining about how little he saw of them.

  ‘Since she was fourteen she hasn’t wanted to spend even ten minutes in our company,’ said Mercy. ‘It’s tough having breakfast with her. The disdain fills the room. I’d rather take my coffee outside.’

  ‘You sound glad she’s gone,’ said Jones.

  Mercy turned to her slowly as if she’d just discovered a wind-up artist in the room.

  ‘Maybe you don’t know what it’s like to love a child,’ said Mercy. ‘There’s no choice and you don’t have any control over it from the moment they’re born. It’s not like being with a guy and thinking, look at all the grief I’m getting from this arsehole, time to move on. The child is a part of you. It would be like walking away from the best part of myself. And now she’s gone I don’t feel, thank God for that, at last I’ve got some . . . what’s it called? Me time, whatever that is. What I feel, Detective Sergeant Jones, is complete emptiness, as if the best love I’ve ever known has buggered off. And it’s my fault. I’m the failure. She loved me.’

  The tears came as a surprise to everyone in the room, including Mercy. They streaked rapidly down her face, unchecked. Jones couldn’t look at her, regretted her cheap trick. Wanted to hug her.

  ‘That’s why it’s so bloody difficult,’ said Mercy. ‘You love someone to pieces. Unconditionally. And they know it. And when they realise they have such total power over you, as a kid, with no understanding of that bond. They . . . they punish you with it for everything they suffer: the boredom, the inadequacy, the sexual tension, the hormonal chaos, the social ineptitude. Everything. They do it because you’re responsible for bringing them into this confusing, incomprehensible world and they do it because they can do it safely, and part of me thinks they do it because they can’t help it. It’s nature’s way of preparing you to be split up. So that the child can eventually go her own sweet way and neither of you feels too badly about it. But don’t get me wrong, Dete
ctive Sergeant Jones, I want her back. She’s not ready to be out there on her own. If I don’t get her back, I can tell you, it will leave me with a big empty hole inside.’

  A huge pendulous silence, as of the inside of a barrage balloon, filled the room. Boxer was stunned to hear Mercy speak like that. Only now did he realise what she’d had pent up inside her. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t talked about these things, it just had never been with such intensity.

  ‘The first line of the letter she left in the station instructed us not to reveal the contents to you,’ said Weaver. ‘Apart from what I’ve already mentioned, I can tell you that it was written in a calm tone and rationally laid out all her reasons for leaving home. She didn’t want us to consider her a missing person. She was just starting up an alternative life. The only reason we’re following this up is because of the allegations she made about you.’

  ‘That sounds as if you’re not actually going to look for her,’ said Boxer.

  ‘You haven’t told us that she’s suffering from any mental health problems. She’s over sixteen, which is the legal age for leaving home. She has money. She won’t be living on the streets. It’s extremely disconcerting for you, I know, but for me to allocate time to this would not impress my superiors.’

  ‘There’s a very good organisation called Missing Persons . . . ’ said Jones.

  ‘I know,’ said Boxer. ‘I run a charitable foundation myself, called LOST. We find missing people, but only when the police have given up.’

  Uneasy glances were exchanged.

  ‘All this information about Amy will be posted on the Police National Computer, which means—’

  ‘We know what it means,’ said Mercy.

  ‘Some photos,’ said Jones, ‘that would be useful . . . ’