You Will Never Find Me

by Robert Wilson

  After an hour the car pulled up. A chain was unthreaded from a metal gate. The car moved forward before reversing, and the roar of the metropolis receded. The boot opened. Two men pulled him out and walked him down the length of a building to a door at the end, which they unlocked. They pushed him through and he hit the wall of an alleyway that was too narrow for both men to walk either side of him. They took him down some steps and into a narrow corridor. They pushed him to the end into a small room on his left.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Amy.

  ‘It’s me, Amy,’ said Boxer.

  ‘Dad?’ she said, which was the first time in years she’d called him that.

  Dennis pushed past him into the room.

  ‘Your dad, he’s doing a very fine thing for you, little girl.’

  ‘I’m not a little girl,’ she said without conviction.

  ‘I’ll leave you alone. Please don’t try anything stupid. It’ll just mean you both get killed.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Boxer. ‘You and I had an agreement. I said I would hand myself in with thirty grand, and you promised me that my daughter would be released. You gave me your word.’

  ‘I did. And that is what is going to happen, but only after we’ve concluded our business here. If I release her now she can go straight to the police—her mother, for instance.’

  ‘She shouldn’t be anywhere near here when . . . he arrives,’ said Boxer. ‘You know what he’s like.’

  ‘There’s nowhere else for her to go. She stays here. We’ll put her in another room.’

  ‘He shouldn’t even see her. He shouldn’t know about her,’ said Boxer.

  ‘She’ll be fine. I’ll make sure of it,’ said Dennis. ‘Now take some time together.’

  He closed the door.

  ‘I’m blindfolded,’ he said.

  ‘Me too,’ said Amy. ‘I’m on the bed, tied to it.’

  He edged forward, hit the metal frame with his knee. He sat down, hands still behind his back and gave her leg an affectionate squeeze.

  ‘Give us a kiss, Dad. I need a kiss.’

  He knelt down, shuffled forward, leaned over, found her cheek and kissed her. He rested his face against hers.

  ‘You’re going to be all right,’ he said.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she whispered in his ear.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ said Boxer, ‘and it’s best you don’t mess your head up with it. All you need to know is that I offended a Colombian gangster in Madrid. He wants revenge and he’s reeled me in by kidnapping you. As the bloke said, you’re going to be released.’

  ‘And what’s going to happen to you?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ she said, and he put his ear close to her lips, felt the terror in her body. ‘I tried to escape when there was just one guy looking after me. He uncuffed me so I could go to the loo and I hit him, tore off my mask and saw his face.’

  ‘And he knows you saw it?’

  ‘Yes, he’s one of their drug dealers,’ said Amy. ‘He came to see me before he left and said he hadn’t told them, but I don’t know. I think he’d have had to. Couldn’t risk it. And if he did tell them, they won’t let me go and they’ll . . . they’ll . . . ’

  ‘Don’t worry. Keep calm,’ he said, kissed her on the cheek again and forced himself to say, ‘Everything is going to be fine.’

  The paramedics had told Mercy she couldn’t come into A & E with them. They’d dropped her outside the front of the hospital. After an emotional goodbye she’d felt an almost maternal wrench as she left Sasha in the back of the ambulance.

  She’d then had to drive at speed, with a blue flashing light on the roof, all the way across London to get to Holloway police station in time for the start of DI Max Hope’s interview. She tried calling Boxer on the way, but his phone was switched off.

  The preliminaries were just winding up as she was shown into the observation room. She wasn’t sure if she was going to be able to stand watching someone else interview a suspect whose information she needed so desperately. She stood with her face up close to the window and observed Lomax, tried to work him out. He wasn’t looking good. He was unshaven and clearly hadn’t slept. But there was intelligence in his eyes and a belligerence in his manner. This might be a tough nut to crack.

  ‘Now, you can lie to me about the contents of this little plastic bottle,’ said DI Hope, holding up the evidence bag with the phial of liquid GHB found in Lomax’s coat pocket, ‘but it won’t help you. We’ll do the analysis and we’ll find out the contents. The same applies to this little bag of white rocks.’

  ‘GHB and crack,’ said Lomax. ‘I use them when I go clubbing.’

  ‘What’s the GHB for? To spike girls’ drinks?’

  ‘I’m not a creep,’ said Lomax. ‘I use it to get high.’

  ‘Where were you last night?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘At the Andover Estate?’

  ‘I’ve never been to the Andover Estate in my life.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never. Not my part of town.’

  ‘Which part of town is that?’

  ‘I don’t know because I’ve never been there.’

  ‘But you know it’s not your part of town so you must know where it is.’

  ‘No. I only know where it isn’t.’

  ‘Tel says he was with you at the Andover Estate last night.’

  ‘Who’s Tel?’

  ‘Terence Mumby. Your partner in crime last night.’

  ‘Never heard of him, so he must be lying.’

  ‘The two of you were seen carrying a girl between you and putting her into a car which we’ve since found out was a silver VW Golf GTI registration LG 59 KFC.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Just after midnight.’

  ‘In the dark?’ said Lomax. ‘Somebody’s identified us in the dead of night on the Andover Estate? They’re all crackheads in there. You got some of them to buy themselves a future by agreeing to your version of things?’

  ‘I thought you’d never been to the Andover Estate?’

  ‘It’s notorious,’ said Lomax. ‘So notorious you’d make sure you never went there.’

  ‘We have another witness who saw you in the stairwell of Danbury House on the Andover Estate at around 11:25 on Friday night, smartly dressed, this woman said, in a blue coat and an open-necked white shirt, and then again a bit later, at 11:40, with a bottle of vodka and two cans of Coke. We have another witness who saw Tel hanging around in the same stairwell on the fourth floor of Danbury House at 11:55 P.M. That’s a hell of a lot of sightings of two people who say they’ve never been to the Andover Estate in their lives, Mr. Lomax.’

  Nothing back from him.

  ‘Do you know Alice Grant?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you visit Alice Grant in her flat, number 504 Danbury House on the Andover Estate, on Friday night at around 11:25?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re absolutely certain you don’t know her, never met her and never been to her flat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you repeat that for me saying the words very clearly.’

  Lomax did as he was asked.

  ‘You know what the problem is here, Miles?’

  ‘Mistaken identity.’

  ‘No, the problem here is that someone’s died,’ said DI Hope. ‘Alice Grant died last night.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘She drank vodka and Coke with a very high concentration of GHB in it and she smoked crack on top. She choked on her own vomit. Now, we’ve found GHB and crack cocaine in your possession. That taken in conjunction with all the sightings of you on the Andover Estate is making it hard for us to ignore your involvement in Alice Grant’s demise. And there’s one other thing . .
. ’

  ‘What?’ said Lomax, exhausted, his defences already starting to break down.

  ‘Aren’t you wondering what you’re doing here?’

  ‘The police move in mysterious ways,’ said Lomax.

  ‘Why were two officers waiting for you when you finally came back to your flat in Elm Park Gardens in your silver Golf GTI registration LG 59 KFC?’

  ‘Whim?’

  ‘Which we’ve since discovered contains a bottle of vodka and some cans of Coke.’

  ‘That’s a crime now, is it?’

  ‘How well do you know Terence Mumby aka Tel?’

  ‘Not at all well, because I’ve never met him before in my life.’

  ‘So what was he doing driving your vehicle away from the Andover Estate last night?’

  ‘I can’t think what you’re talking about.’

  ‘His fingerprints are all over the front of the car, inside and out, all over the leather steering wheel and the leather gear stick,’ said Hope. ‘I wouldn’t let Terence Mumby anywhere near my car, even if I knew him . . . especially if I knew him.’

  ‘You’re probably a very sensible man.’

  ‘Think about it,’ said Hope. ‘Go over in your mind what you did last night that meant that two police officers were waiting for you when you came home.’

  He had thought about it while he’d been sweating it out in the cells. He remembered holding the glasses and filling them with drinks. He’d taken his own and left the other two, but he was pretty sure they wouldn’t get much in the way of fingerprints from them.

  ‘I’ve already thought about it,’ said Lomax, ‘and decided that their presence must have been delirium-induced.’

  ‘You’re a clever boy, aren’t you, Miles? You’re educated,’ said Hope. ‘You’re playing this game because you know what you’re looking at here, don’t you? Murder and kidnap.’

  ‘Kidnap?’

  ‘You were seen with Tel, carrying someone to your car,’ said Hope. ‘She’s been identified as a seventeen-year-old girl called Amy Boxer.’

  He pushed the photograph Mercy had sent him across the table. Lomax, who was still trying to maintain his crumbling facade by sitting sideways and cross-legged, glanced over his shoulder at the shot.

  ‘Tel says she doesn’t look like that now. The long hair’s gone and it’s in corn rows, but that was the only shot her mother had of her.’

  Lomax blinked, said nothing, but the sight of Amy had restarted something in his mind.

  ‘I can see she’s ringing bells with you, Miles,’ said Hope. ‘Feeling a bit guilty about something, are we?’

  Lomax felt himself pitchforked into a corner now, with this DI lunging at him at will. He didn’t know Tel well enough. He could be blabbing away, trying to save himself from a kidnap charge. What was the sentence for that? He had no idea. What did they have on him that placed him at the scene? Or did they have the idiot Tel’s word and bugger all else?

  As he thought this he realised his brain had embarked on a little diversion to stop him thinking about what was really bothering him. Ever since he’d left Amy in the company of Dennis and Darren, ever since he’d whispered, ‘See you in Cardiff,’ in her ear, he’d been thinking about her. He’d thought he was hard. He’d walked away from people many times before, people he could have saved from some very bad treatment, figured they would learn from it. But Amy was different. She wasn’t part of the scene and this wasn’t a question of a punishment beating. They couldn’t rely on her to keep her mouth shut. The only sure way was to . . . He couldn’t even say it to himself. He’d walked away from her, thinking he could do what he’d always done, but it had played on his mind and he’d found himself writhing in his seat at traffic lights, hands clenched on the steering wheel.

  ‘Glad to see you’re thinking now,’ said Hope. ‘Want a clue as to why we came knocking at your particular door?’

  Lomax stared at him with ‘Go on then’ eyes.

  ‘The neighbour said there was a party going on at Alice Grant’s. She heard music. Amy Winehouse. Then it was turned off,’ said Hope, and held up the evidence bag with the little remote in it. ‘This, I’m afraid, along with all the witness statements, and Tel’s desperate blabbing, puts you at the scene.’

  Lomax’s face drained as he remembered. His panic at seeing Alice Grant convulsing on the bed. His attempt to put her into the recovery position. Amy coming in and seeing the state of her. The girl’s instinct to call for an ambulance. Slapping the phone out of her hands. Her rush for the door. He’d picked up the remote, turned off the music, thrown it on the sofa. Dumb.

  ‘Now look, Miles. I know it’s not your normal line of work, kidnapping,’ said Hope, gentle now. ‘We know you’re a drug dealer, which is why your prints are on our database. And this means we’re inclined to believe that you’re not doing this off your own bat, but because you have to. You owe someone. Is that right?’

  Lomax gave him the long, hard ‘Go on’ look that didn’t concede anything until he knew what he could get in return.

  ‘We might be able to look at Alice Grant’s death as manslaughter rather than murder, but only if you come completely clean about what you were doing with Amy Boxer. Where did you take her? Who were you taking her to? Unlike Alice Grant, Amy’s is a life we can still save, and if we succeed in doing that then we can talk to the CPS on your behalf. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that you’ll get off scot-free, but I’ll make sure you don’t go down for two life terms.’

  A long silence followed in which trains of thought left and returned to the same undeniable terminus: the choice between two life terms or being hounded to death by the Chilcotts. But there were also a couple of deciding factors: the way the Chilcotts had looked at him, measuring him up for a coffin, and Amy. He had to admit it to himself: he liked her.

  ‘We took her to the derelict Rowland Estate at the back of a warehouse on Neckinger in Bermondsey,’ he said.

  Mercy, whose face was right up close to the viewing panel, dropped her forehead against the glass, closed her eyes and breathed out a long emotional sigh.

  ‘We’re holding Charles Boxer,’ said Dennis. ‘He’s ready for you.’

  Jaime told him that El Osito was still sleeping after his morphine jab in the afternoon.

  ‘I’ll wake him up at eleven,’ he said. ‘Send a car for us then.’ Jaime sat on his hotel bed in the dark, looking out over the lights of the city, the bridges across the river, the traffic on the Embankment. He had a Walther PPK in his hand, which had been handed over to him in the Colombian restaurant in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre. It was a small gun, no larger than his hand, its metal warm from being close to his body. He aimed it out of the window at the intermittent flashes of the warning lights on the four towers of Battersea Power Station. Then he put it next to him on the bed, stared between his feet.

  A while later he took another call, this time from the journalist Raul Brito in Spain, who gave him the latest developments in the case of the dismembered girl.

  At 11:00 P.M. he shrugged into a leather jacket, slipped the Walther PPK into an inside pocket, crossed the corridor to El Osito’s room and let himself in. El Osito was still sleeping. He turned on a bedside lamp and took out a small bag of cocaine. On the glass surface of the bedside table he prepared two lines and nudged El Osito awake. He surfaced with a huge intake of breath through his nose and stared silently at Jaime with shining black eyes.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘They have the Englishman. They’re sending a car now.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Just after 11:00 P.M. local time,’ said Jaime and handed him a rolled twenty.

  El Osito, still fully clothed, leaned over and snorted the two prepared lines and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Jaime positioned the wheelchair next to the bed and dragged El Osit
o into the seat.

  ‘I want to change my shirt,’ said El Osito. ‘I stink.’

  Jaime found him a new shirt. El Osito peeled off the old one.

  He dressed and Jaime put a jacket over his shoulders. They went down to the reception area, where one of Dennis’s drivers was waiting with a VW Caravelle parked outside. They got El Osito into the back and locked off his wheelchair. Jaime sat with him, told him the latest news that Raul Brito had given him over the phone. El Osito laughed in a way that was so mirthless it sounded like the barking of a savage dog. He stopped as suddenly as he’d started and began doing some stretching exercises, twisting in his chair and then lifting himself with his powerful arms as if in readiness for what was to come.

  Jaime leaned his head against the window and wondered with what horrific mental gymnastics El Osito had trained his mind in preparation for this event. Vicente had said that El Osito’s torture sessions were the stuff of legend, but these were punishments meted out to wrongdoers as a warning to others. There was no precedent for anybody who’d done the sort of damage to him that Charles Boxer had. Jaime didn’t want to think about it. He knew that violence was a necessary part of their business, but he’d never had the appetite for the excesses of some of his associates. Perhaps the heavy use of drugs had dehumanised and deranged them so that they saw others like animals. But that didn’t really explain it.

  He hoped the girl wouldn’t be there. He wished he could speak English better, to impress on Dennis how important it was that El Osito shouldn’t know about the girl. That was a scenario he dreaded. Vicente had told him that El Osito’s torture sessions had been based on extensive reading about the Chilean DINA’s methods, under Pinochet in the 1970s. He had been particularly fascinated by the activities in a torture centre in Santiago that was known by two names: the Discotheque and La Venda Sexy. Jaime hadn’t wanted to know any more than that.