You Will Never Find Me

by Robert Wilson

  Dennis Chilcott hated hospitals. Even from the outside. He would do anything not to go in one. The only reason he hadn’t cut up rough over the phone was that El Osito had called it a clinic, but as soon as the cab pulled up outside he knew. He steeled himself as he entered the glass doors, saw the blank walls beyond the reception, the people in white suspended in the sterilised interior.

  It was better than the NHS hospitals back home. The antiseptic smell was not quite so pervasive and there were no bleeding hooligans or raving drunks ricocheting off the walls. He put on his mental blinkers, joined a gaping-mouthed man on a trolley in the lift and stared at a nurse’s calves to distract himself from the horror.

  Now he was in room 401 and so appalled by El Osito’s damaged legs that he could barely contain himself.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said in a voice that came up from the basement of his own nightmares, ‘what the hell happened to you?’

  ‘I had a car accident,’ said El Osito. ‘My legs took the full impact. I’m O.K. but it will be two months before I can walk again.’ Dennis allowed a wondrous delusion of relief to spread through him. He was still nauseated at the idea of injury, but at least it wasn’t a punishment attack or a gang-war wound. No sooner had he thought this than he revised his idea. Was he kidding himself? He knew about the brutality of Vicente’s competitor, El Chapo. The media was full of it, and he had the global reach to pull it off.

  ‘I can see you’re concerned,’ said El Osito. ‘Don’t be. Tell me.’

  ‘Your competitors, have they . . . ?’

  ‘This is nothing to do with the competition,’ said El Osito. ‘That all happens back in Cuidad Juarez. This was a car accident. Unfortunate. Nothing more.’

  Jaime looked to see if Dennis believed it. He seemed to have suspended judgement for the moment, but he wasn’t happy. He was looking at those broken legs as if they were a pair of battered wives insisting that they’d had a fall. The Mexican wished his English was better. He had enough to grasp that El Osito was passing his injuries off as a car accident, something he might well have spun around Vicente too. What concerned Jaime more was that he probably wouldn’t be able to understand why El Osito had called Dennis to his bedside. He was maintaining the blankest possible expression in the hope that El Osito wouldn’t send him out of the room.

  ‘I want you to do something for me in London,’ said El Osito.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Dennis.

  ‘You have a good network of dealers,’ said El Osito. ‘How many?’

  ‘Maybe fifty,’ said Dennis, not wanting to reveal too much of his operation.

  ‘All over London?’

  ‘We’ve got it covered, yes.’

  ‘And you have a lot of safe places?’ said El Osito. ‘Places where you can keep product for distribution and money for collection?’

  ‘I’ve got a chain of hardware stores and timber yards and, yes, other commercial property where I can store things.’

  ‘I want you to find somebody for me.’

  ‘You know, when I tell people I live in London they always ask me whether I know so-and-so,’ said Dennis. ‘They don’t understand how big London is, how . . . different it is now. You can live there for years without meeting your neighbour. I assume, from the way you’ve just asked me, that you have a name but no address, and I’m telling you it’s not going to be easy. Allow plenty of time.’

  ‘I have a name and an address, but I know you won’t find him there. You can try but my instinct tells me you won’t have any luck. But what I can do is tell you how you’re going to find this person for me.’

  Dennis didn’t like the assumption in El Osito’s voice. In fact, he didn’t like the way this conversation was proceeding at all. It seemed to him that the Colombian’s request was not unconnected to the state of the man’s legs, and he felt distinctly herded, even if it was by a cripple.

  Despite this unease, his finely honed business instincts were intact and telling him to hear the man out, just to see if there were any opportunities on the way.

  ‘You understand that finding people is outside my field of expertise,’ said Dennis, ‘but I know people who can do that sort of thing.’

  ‘This must be done by you or your organisation,’ said El Osito. ‘This is no ordinary piece of business. This is not work for a private investigator.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Dennis, ‘but in return we’d appreciate a demonstration of your goodwill in terms of what we discussed the other night. Supply and price. If we can agree on that I’m sure we can help each other.’

  ‘Always the businessman, Dennis.’

  ‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Dennis, who, if he hadn’t been standing by a hospital bed, would have been enjoying this little reversal of power.

  ‘The man I want you to find could have an impact on our business. He is English, he has police connections and he has infiltrated some of our command structure.’

  Jaime was lost, while Dennis’s ears were ringing, as they always did when his systolic blood pressure went over 180, which was what happened when he heard the words ‘police’ and ‘infiltrated’ in the same sentence.

  ‘So what’s his game?’

  ‘His game is that he thought his daughter had run away from home to be with me, but he was mistaken. I picked up a girl in a club in Madrid who looked like his daughter. We had sex and that was the end of it,’ said El Osito. ‘The next thing, he comes to my flat demanding to know where his daughter is. I tell him I don’t know. He says I was seen with her and that she’s now been found murdered and I am responsible. We had a disagreement and he left. We have discovered how he found me here in Madrid and we are clearing that up. What we need now is for you to find the Englishman in London.’

  He handed over Charles Boxer’s passport photocopy which Brito had got from the concierge from the Hotel Moderno.

  ‘The way you’re going to do this,’ said El Osito, ‘is to find his runaway daughter.’

  He handed over Amy Boxer’s passport photo.

  ‘And why should it be any easier for me to find her if her own father can’t track her down?’

  ‘His daughter is clever. She doesn’t want to be found by him. The father abused her . . . sexually.’

  ‘Wha-a-at?’ said Dennis, instantly furious. ‘His own daughter?’ El Osito was surprised but delighted to have stumbled across this unexpected outrage. It was as if he’d told the man that Boxer had abused Chilcott’s daughter.

  ‘It must have been going on for a long time for this girl to go to such lengths,’ said El Osito. ‘She found someone who looked like her, gave this girl her passport just to fool her father into believing that she’d run away to Madrid.’

  ‘Tell me how we’re going to do it,’ said Dennis, his face expressionless with subterranean fury.

  23

  10:00 P.M., THURSDAY 22ND MARCH 2012

  Tower Hill, London

  Go to Tower Gateway DLR, take a train direction Greenwich,’ said the voice. ‘No need to work out if you’re being followed—you are. Don’t do anything other than what you’re told to do.’

  The train was waiting on the platform with one or two people in each carriage. Rush hour had long gone. Bobkov went to the centre of the train and sat with the briefcase of money between his feet and checked the people in the carriage with him: a commuter in her thirties, trouser suit, dark mac, red scarf. A man in his twenties, laptop bag slung over his shoulder, resting on his thighs, buds in, feet tapping to the music, hands playing on the edge of his laptop case. Neither paid any attention to him. A big man got on, sat almost opposite him, heavy dark wool coat, grey trilby, dark-rimmed glasses, grey trousers, scuffed black shoes, gloves, which he occasionally thumped together as if driving the fingers up to the ends. He looked like the man Mercy had described leaving the Mercedes CLS in Cromwell Avenue.

  The
doors closed, the train pulled away. Bobkov had always found something eerie about driverless trains, especially ones taking lighted carriages out from the safety of stations into the darkest night. He felt exposed, as if his back was in the cross hairs of a distant sniper. A great sense of loneliness settled over him despite his travel companions.

  He thought of his ex-wife lying in a hospital bed under the eerie glow of the intensive care machinery, her face, devastated by alcohol, now strangely slackened by the stroke. A figure so distant from the woman he’d met and fallen in love with, she felt like someone from another life.

  They’d been so happy when Sasha was born. But that had been the trigger. She gave up work, stayed at home, lost touch with people. He was travelling all over the world, doing business, networking, then politicking, until finally he went back to the parallel world he had begun to miss. This meant that he could no longer tell the whole truth, and Tracey knew that something had shifted but mistakenly thought it was away from her. She couldn’t have been further from the mark.

  The train stopped at three stations with nobody getting on or off. The woman took a call on her mobile phone. She smiled and spoke a language he thought was probably Georgian. She had the black hair and dark beauty of the women from that country. At West India Quay station his phone rang.

  ‘Leave the train at Heron Quays,’ said the voice. ‘Go to the front carriage, wait outside and reboard at the last moment. Sit as near to the front as possible.’

  Bobkov did as he was told. As the doors closed on the lead carriage, he looked back at his erstwhile companions. The woman had gone, leaving the young man and the big fellow in the trilby. His new carriage was empty. He sat at the front window, self-conscious, with the briefcase on the seat beside him and the unseen crosshairs wavering over his forehead.

  He swallowed hard to control the emotion in his throat as his mind veered away from the professional and out into the deeper darkness of a world with no Sasha in it. That would be true loneliness. The gap left by a dead child was unfillable. He had to pinch the bridge of his nose to squeeze the tears back in. He took a deep breath and sat back to watch his reflection in the window as if he was endlessly journeying towards himself while remaining tantalisingly out of reach.

  As the train pulled into Crossharbour station another call told him to get off the train and make his way across the bridge over Millwall Inner Dock. The voice took him along streets in which he encountered no people, over which towered high-rise blocks of glittering apartments. At one point the landmark of One Canada Square appeared briefly between other office buildings and disappeared as he turned down Byng Street and made his way past the silent North Pole Pub and more apartment blocks towards Cuba Street and the river.

  At the end of Cuba Street was an old Riverbus boarding point, now closed. There was a barred gate across the entrance with rubbish and untamed shrubbery beyond. The voice told him that the padlock to the gate had been sheared and that he could go through and onto the West India Pier.

  Inside the dark and derelict Riverbus terminal he was told to tie one end of the rope to the handle of the briefcase, using the torch on the mobile to see.

  ‘Now go to the end of the pier.’

  He had to fight his way past the thick branches which had grown up in the old terminal to get to the edge of the river. There the covered walkway for access to the boats started on a concrete platform and ended on two wooden piles driven into the riverbed five metres out.

  It was difficult to judge the solidity of the floor of the walkway so he held on to the handrail and shuffled along, testing it for strength as he went. At the end of the pier was the slurping darkness of the river. A metal bar had been secured across the exit. The voice told him to tie the other end of the rope to the bar.

  ‘Make sure you tie a good knot,’ said the voice. ‘We don’t want that slipping into the water. And check the knot on the handle of the case.’

  ‘It’s all secure,’ said Bobkov.

  ‘Now pay out the rope until the case is hanging above the water. The rope should be exactly the right length.’

  ‘O.K. It’s tight.’

  ‘Now leave. Go back the way you came. Turn left onto Westferry Road and take a right onto Heron Quay. That will take you to Heron Quays DLR station. This time you take the train to Stratford and from there you go by Overground to Finchley and Frognal.’

  ‘What about my reward?’ said Bobkov. ‘You said there would be a reward.’

  ‘As soon as we’ve checked the money you get your reward.’

  ‘And when do I get my son back? I’ve shown that you can trust me. Everything has happened as you asked.’

  ‘If that is the case then you have nothing to fear,’ said the voice. ‘You will get your instructions for the second payment—’

  ‘The second payment?’ said Bobkov. ‘I’ve just cleared my personal and my company accounts in order to raise that seven hundred and fifty thousand. You never said anything about a second payment.’

  He had stopped halfway up the covered walkway. The Thames gurgled and lapped beneath him. An engine approached, a boat on the river. Through the windows of the walkway a white light in the middle of the intense darkness kept coming.

  ‘A second payment was implied. The first was to prove that you could be trusted not to involve the authorities. The second is for the safe return of your son,’ said the voice. ‘Now leave the pier. I want you away from the river. Now!’

  ‘Tell me about this second payment because I don’t know where it’s going to come from.’

  ‘We’re not being greedy. We know we asked you for five million. With no negotiation we’re accepting the same again, another seven hundred and fifty thousand. One and a half million for the safe return of Sasha, your only son. Now leave the pier, Mr. Bobkov.’

  He took two steps and his foot went through the floor. He gasped with the shock and the pain as his leg was scraped up to the knee. The phone skittered away from him and slipped through the gap between the floor and wall of the walkway. Bobkov eased his leg out, felt the skin and trouser material tearing against the ragged edge of the hole. He crawled back to the end of the pier.

  The noise of the approaching boat eased as it arrived at the end of the pier. It was a rigid inflatable speedboat with a light mounted on a structure over the engine. There were just two men in the boat. On the inflatable flanks of the boat was written cw boat hire. The rubber squeaked against the wooden piles as the boat glided under the walkway. Bobkov peered over the edge, lying flat. Both men were in hooded waterproofs. One of them cut the rope and retrieved the briefcase. The boat pulled away and headed back in the direction of Greenwich.

  Bobkov crawled back up the walkway, feeling with his hands for the phone. A glimmer of light to his left about halfway up told him that the torch was still on. The phone had landed on one of the steel girders supporting the walkway. He reached through the gap and grabbed the phone, clasped it to his face.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ said the voice.

  ‘My foot went through the floor. It’s rotten. I dropped the phone.’

  ‘All right, all right. We’ve got the money. I’m going to hang up now and you’ll get another call in a minute.’

  Bobkov crawled off the walkway back into the terminal building. The blood was running warmly down his leg, soaking into his sock. He was shocked to find how physically soft he’d become. It had been fifteen years since he’d left the FSB. Fifteen years of sitting at desks, eating lunches and dinners. He’d grown flabby and pathetic.

  This time the thick, stubborn branches growing in the terminal building seemed to grab him, snarling around his ankle. As he left the building, he tripped and fell with his foot trapped in the terminal while the rest of him lay outside, face up to the clouds scudding across the starlit sky. The phone rang.

  ‘Yes,’ he
said.

  ‘Hello, Daddy. It’s me.’

  ‘Oh my God, Sasha,’ he said, but the boy’s unbroken treble voice had already pierced him, and he had to cough against the emotion and the tears to show his son that he was still strong.

  ‘Let’s just get this straight in our heads,’ said Darren. ‘El Osito wants us to go and see this girl Chantrelle’s mother.’

  ‘Her name is Alice Grant. She lives on an estate in north London,’ said Dennis. ‘You make contact with her and do one of two things: find out where her daughter was living, because that’s where Amy Boxer will be going every day to check whether she’s come back with her passport, or get the mother to call Amy and tell her to come to her flat to pick up something from Chantrelle. The point being that once we’ve got Amy Boxer, then we can reel the father in. By all accounts the father is not to be messed with.’

  ‘So it’s the father who’s the problem?’

  ‘The one who’s been abusing his own daughter,’ said Dennis. ‘We’ve got a name and address for him. We can check that, but El Osito doesn’t think he’ll be there. He’ll know we’re on to him.’

  ‘Look, Dad, we all hate child abuse,’ said Darren, ‘but what exactly has Boxer done that means we’ve got to fuck around finding him rather than getting on with what we’re supposed to be doing, which is run our business?’

  ‘He has police connections. We think Amy’s mother is a copper, and we know that Charles Boxer was in the army and in a homicide squad in the Met. And not only that,’ said Dennis, holding up his finger at his prowling son, ‘he can identify El Osito, and you know what these blokes are like about that.’

  ‘And why would Boxer tell anybody?’

  ‘His connections. There’s an element of risk attached to him.’

  ‘You know what I think?’ said Darren. ‘And I’m surprised you don’t see this yourself, Dad. I think El Osito is shifting the risk he’s exposed his organisation to . . . to ours. We’re going to expose ourselves to Alice Grant for a kick-off. What do we know about her? She might be a cop for all we know.’