You Will Never Find Me Page 4

  ‘Does he have a name?’

  ‘Marcus. He lives off Coldharbour Lane somewhere. I can get you his address, as long as you promise you won’t—’

  ‘I told you, this is about Amy. We’re not interested in ciggie smuggling.’

  ‘How much did you girls make out of the Tenerife trip?’ asked Boxer.

  ‘Four hundred quid—and a good time.’

  ‘And at no point did Amy say anything about leaving home?’ said Mercy, getting a little tougher now.

  ‘She wasn’t happy. That’s all I know. She never said she was going to get out. But you know . . . ’

  ‘What?’

  Karen’s eyes cast about over the floor, looking for the right words.

  ‘I know how you feel, Mrs. Danquah.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Mercy, amazed.

  ‘Everybody likes Amy,’ she said. ‘Everybody. She had all those guys eating out of her hand. Even my man. And you know how she does it? She lets you know she doesn’t give a fuck about anybody. She goes to bed with Glider, but she’s the one who leaves him in the morning before he wakes up. I saw him out on the balcony, smoking, looking for her up and down the beach. Wondering where she’d gone. He was hooked.’

  ‘Tell us about Glider,’ said Boxer. ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘Got to be at least thirty, maybe more. White. Shaved head. Tats all the way up both arms, but nothing on his hands. Muscles. He works out. Violent. He’s got a rep for that—blows without warning.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Every detail helps, Karen,’ said Mercy.

  ‘He’s got a huge cock,’ she blurted.

  Silence.

  ‘You see,’ she said. ‘Not every detail helps.’

  Still naked he opened a kitchen drawer. Four knives. Two big, a medium and a small. One meat cleaver. He laid them on the counter, saw his reflection in the bright, shiny steel of the cleaver he’d bought in Toledo. His eyes gone to black.

  Under the sink a roll of bin bags. He tore off six. Back into the living room. Light on. Knelt by the body, studied the mess of clothes around her neck. Her face with two cuts, one from forehead to cheek, the other down the side of her nose. He took her jacket off first, stuffed it in a bin liner. Then came the dress and bra. He put the pants he’d taken from his pocket in another bin liner, looked at her bare feet. The shoes. He checked the room, then the corridor. They were up by the door. They still had labels on the soles. He dropped them into the bin liner with the pants, retraced his steps, checking the floor. He looked under the table, lifted the sofa. Her small black handbag. He put that in with the shoes. He had a thought. Tore off another bin liner from the roll. Took his trousers, emptied the pockets, found his damp shirt, stripped off his socks, stuffed the lot in the bin liner, put it by the door. Keep it separate.

  He went back to the body, squatted and lifted her dead weight in one movement without even a grunt. He put her down in the shower cubicle with her head by the drain hole.

  The master bedroom had been converted into his weights room. He removed the two sets of twenty-five-kilo weights from each end of the bench press and took the bar back to the shower. He cut the hem off a sheet from his bed with a pair of scissors. He tied it around her ankles and secured them to the bar. He planted his feet either side of her legs and lifted the bar to chest height. He stepped forward and jerked the bar up above his head and rested it across the top of the cubicle. She was hanging free of the floor, just her hair making contact. He put her head into a supermarket bag, cut off all her hair and carefully tied it up in the bag. He positioned her with her head above the drain hole. He went to the kitchen for the knives and made himself a cup of coffee.

  Pig killing. La matanza. He’d been to a few in his time. Something human trembled on the outer limits of his mind as he remembered children running around the farm while the men, having killed the pig and bled it out, scalded it and scraped off the bristles, leaving a perfectly pink corpse. This they hung up by its hocks, and, as the pig was unzipped with a blade, the women went in and hauled out the guts into massive metal bowls. The dogs came skipping around, tails wagging, heads lowering, looking for a bit of generosity. The women turned away, blood-spattered from the clean, pink corpse, as if from a freshly murdered husband.

  El Osito poured himself another deep-black coffee, sipped it, relishing its tarry bitterness. He parted the edge of the blind from the wall, looked out onto the grey morning. Two young men walked towards the Metro station, hoods up, hands in pockets, no work, no money. For a moment he envied them, that they weren’t standing naked in a kitchen with knives on the counter €50,000 under the bed, a half-kilo of cocaine under the sink and a dead girl hanging by her ankles in the shower.

  He let the blind fall back. He took out the coke from its hiding place and laid down two fat lines, which he chopped and shaped with the smallest knife. He took a bill from the money he’d emptied out of his pockets and snorted the lines, rubbed his gums with the remnants. He slapped his buttocks, picked up the knives and the cleaver and went to work on his own little matanza.

  4

  11:30 A.M., SUNDAY 18TH MARCH 2012

  Railton Road, Brixton, London

  They were sitting in Mercy’s car outside the Railton Road Off Licence opposite a line of Victorian terraced houses, waiting for Marcus Alleyne, the black guy who’d met Amy off the flight back from Tenerife with her suitcase of cigarettes that small lifetime ago. He wasn’t in. The neighbour said he hadn’t come back from his Saturday night out.

  ‘Prolly wi’ one his bitches,’ said the teenaged black kid, trousers hanging down the backs of his legs, Knicks cap on backwards, high-top Nikes. He knew a cop when he saw one.

  ‘Do you have to use that word?’ asked Mercy.

  ‘S’wat they is,’ said the boy, mock puzzled, glad to be of annoyance.

  ‘That’s what they are?’ said Mercy.

  ‘Hunh?’

  Back in the car. Mercy irritable. Everything happening so slowly. No fast-moving investigation here, with developments by the second. And she didn’t want Boxer around either. He was physically close but miles off emotionally. Of course she’d wanted him there last night. She’d have even let him into her bed if he’d had the inclination. But he hadn’t. He’d been affectionate with her, as he always had been, but there was a new remoteness. She wanted to be held fiercely. To have someone squeeze their strength into her. Make her feel special.

  ‘We could be here for ever. Maybe you should do something else. There’s no point in the two of us wasting our time over the same guy.’

  ‘What did you make of Karen?’ asked Boxer as Mercy started the car and pulled away.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Mercy. ‘You see that look on a lot of people’s faces who’ve been in contact with Amy. She’s hurt.’

  ‘She didn’t like it that her boyfriend was eating out of Amy’s hand or that she was sleeping with Glider.’

  ‘I didn’t like it either,’ said Mercy. ‘Little minx.’

  ‘Minx?’

  ‘I’m trying to make our daughter sound a bit more playful than a slut.’

  ‘It reduced Karen in the pecking order, that’s why she didn’t like it,’ said Boxer. ‘And every time you thought Amy was off with Karen somewhere, she wasn’t. Karen was the cover. I think she’s feeling a bit used.’

  ‘Planning,’ said Mercy. ‘Thinking ahead. I have to hand it to Amy for that. I admire her . . . for that.’

  ‘That didn’t sound like planning to me.’

  ‘Look at us here. Look at us doing what Roy Chapel knows is a waste of time,’ said Mercy. ‘Talking to her friends, finding out about her nefarious contacts. Amy’s a London kid. She understands a few things about this city. Just having Karen as a friend, rather than anybody from her fancy school. She knows the different strata of society. Drop out of
one and into another and nobody will find you. Where are we going to look when we’ve exhausted the obvious? You can start in Cricklewood and I’ll get going in Catford. See you in three decades.’

  ‘And Karen feels left out.’

  ‘Amy can inspire belief. The belief that anything is possible. People like Karen think that if they attach themselves to someone like Amy some of that possibility might rub off. And then Amy dumps them. They’ve served their purpose.’

  ‘She doesn’t care what people think of her,’ said Boxer. ‘That takes strength of character. Most people want to be liked. We admire those who don’t give a damn.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what it’ll take,’ said Mercy. ‘She won’t understand until she’s cared for somebody herself.’

  They arrived back at Mercy’s house and Boxer went over to his car. He tried to call his mother. Still no answer. Mobile off.

  ‘I’ll follow up Alleyne,’ said Mercy. ‘I’ll call you when I’ve hit that dead end.’

  He hugged her nicely, but not fiercely. They separated, still holding hands.

  ‘Let’s not get down,’ said Boxer. ‘That’s the state she wants us to be in: questioning our own professionalism.’

  ‘I’d better call the school,’ said Mercy, ‘even though I can’t imagine . . . ’

  ‘You know the rules,’ said Boxer, squeezing her hand to his lips. ‘Everything by the book, until you throw the book away.’

  Boxer got into his car, left. Mercy found Amy’s teacher’s home phone number and put in a call. The teacher was shocked, especially when Mercy quoted Amy’s nihilistic views on education from her note. She hadn’t seen it coming. They spoke for half an hour, running through every possibility, the teacher giving her all the names of Amy’s ‘friends’ (none of whom had ever been mentioned by Amy) and how she would interview every one of them. Mercy kept up her end but knew this was going nowhere.

  She took a long bath, changed into casual clothes, jeans, a high roll-neck black jumper. She put on make-up. She knew precisely what she was doing. She finished and stared back at herself in the mirror, breathing the emotion down. She glanced at the hand where Boxer had kissed her, then back up to her own face looking for the chink that would reveal how pathetic she felt inside: the contemptible state of hopeful hopelessness where Boxer’s new liaison had left her.

  Downstairs, she picked up the keys, back into the car, drove to Railton Road, parked outside Alleyne’s house once more. There was a light on in his flat this time. She checked her eyes in the rear-view. What was going on in her head? She’d only ever seen this guy for five minutes and he was eight, maybe ten years younger than her. She leaned forward searching for the glint of recklessness in her black pupils.

  Up the steps to the front door, rang the bell, heard his feet rumbling down the stairs. Opened the door. And there he was: tall, good-looking, short dreadlocks, high cheekbones, dark brown eyes, perfect white teeth, a scar on his temple. He was wearing dark blue jeans and a white shirt open so that she could see the hard rack of his stomach, no shoes, long bare feet.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I was expecting somebody else.’

  ‘You got me,’ said Mercy, holding up her warrant card. ‘Police.’

  ‘Then you’d better come in,’ he said, smiling, not a flicker of nervousness.

  He led her up the stairs, buttoning up his shirt, took her into the sitting room, where there was an orange three-piece suite that had seen better days and some lime-green cushions. Mounted on the wall was a home movie system with a fifty-five-inch LED screen no thicker than a slim paperback. Alleyne slipped on a pair of top-range Nikes and lay back on the sofa.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ said Mercy.

  ‘That is very true,’ he said.

  ‘But I know you.’

  ‘You do?’ he said, eyebrows raised, still smiling, enjoying the view.

  ‘You are Marcus Alleyne and you met my daughter coming off a plane from Tenerife on Sunday 11th March. You took a large suitcase from her containing cigarettes which had been brought into this country illegally.’

  She leaned forward and showed him the photo she’d taken at Gatwick on her mobile phone. Alleyne raised an eyebrow, which nearly communicated surprise.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ he said, unmoved.

  ‘Why should it be interesting rather than, say, alarming?’

  ‘Because it doesn’t look as if you’re here with the full force of the law.’

  ‘So you already know what that looks like.’

  ‘Seen a bit of it in my time, you know, nothing heavy, no SWAT teams at dawn kind of thing. More like weary plods in the rain,’ he said. ‘And I can tell you none of it has been as pleasant as this little visit. So what’s it all about, Inspector Danquah? Isn’t that a Ghanaian name?’

  She nodded. ‘And you?’

  ‘Originally?’ he said. ‘Trinidad. Several generations ago.’

  Silence.

  Mercy couldn’t fathom what was going on in her chest. As if there was a thin translucent membrane stretched tight by all her loves and losses, so tight that it was about to split, and if it did she would lose all control.

  Alleyne sat up, could see some sort of crisis going on in her face. He clasped his hands between his knees, shook them up and down as if he had dice in them.

  ‘You all right, Inspector Danquah?’

  ‘My daughter . . . ’ she started but couldn’t continue as the membrane swelled.

  ‘Something happened to Amy?’

  ‘She ran away from home last night.’

  ‘All right,’ said Alleyne, relieved that this wasn’t some horror for him and he wouldn’t be heading for the cells on a Sunday night. ‘What you need, Inspector Danquah . . . is some tea . . . maybe coffee, if you’re not the tea kind. The real thing, no shit from a jar.’

  ‘I’ll take the “no shit from a jar” coffee,’ said Mercy, needing him out of the room so she could get a grip. ‘With milk, thanks.’

  Alleyne went into the galley kitchen off the living room, shook his head at the six different espresso machines he had there, selected one, turned it on, looked for some coffee pods that would fit. He heated some milk in a steamer and under the noise of it made a call to the woman who was supposed to show up and told her not to come unless she wanted to share an evening with DI Mercy Danquah. She didn’t.

  ‘Sugar?’ he asked, coming back into the sitting room, two lumps in the light palm of his hand. ‘You know, Inspector Danquah—’

  ‘Mercy. For God’s sake, call me Mercy.’

  ‘I only met your daughter for, like, a few minutes.’

  ‘Then how did you know who to meet off the plane from Tenerife?’

  ‘We had a coffee before. She came with her friend Karen. We introduced ourselves, clocked each other. That was it. I always get the coloured girls.’

  ‘And apart from the Gatwick meet you never saw her again?’ Alleyne shook his head, sipped his coffee.

  ‘Karen said she was sleeping with Glider. Do you know him?’

  ‘You think she ran off with G?’ he said, shaking his head at the unlikely combination.

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  ‘I can put my ear to the ground if you like.’

  ‘Is that how you’re still communicating in Brixton?’

  ‘You’re a funny lady, you know that?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me where I can find G?’

  ‘That would not win me any friends, Mercy. You hear what I’m saying?’

  ‘I’m not interested in petty crime. I’m a mother trying to find her daughter.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you that G, he don’t like . . . intrusions, even if they don‘t come with a blue flashing light attached,’ said Alleyne. ‘And if he heard that it . . . emanated from me . . . ’

  ‘O.K., let’s see if we can narro
w it down,’ said Mercy. ‘Is he London based?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘North or south London?’

  Alleyne demurred. Mercy got annoyed.

  ‘All right, Marcus. I told you I wasn’t interested in any of your petty crimes, but that’s only until you clam up on me. Then I start calling the men in blue about this fence I know in Railton Road, etcetera, etcetera. So let’s have it. We’re talking about my daughter.’

  ‘Has she been kidnapped?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, like you said, she ran away of her own accord. There’s no need to threaten me because your daughter doesn’t want to go to school any more.’

  ‘What do you know about that?’ said Mercy, mouth snapping like a dog.

  ‘Whoa!’ said Alleyne, arms up. ‘Just a turn of phrase, Mercy. No need to take my hand off.’

  ‘She’s only seventeen years old,’ said Mercy.

  ‘Thinks she know everything, right?’ said Alleyne.

  A huge racking sob came up from Mercy’s chest. The membrane had split, just when she’d taken her eye off it, loosened her grip. She coughed against it, but it was too late. The dam had burst. Alleyne went down on his haunches in front of her, held her knees. She fell forward, buried her face in his neck.

  ‘Hey, Mercy,’ he said, patting her back, amazed to find himself in this position. ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.’

  ‘Hold me tight,’ she whispered. ‘Tight!’

  ‘You’re on the edge, Mercy,’ said Alleyne, wrapping his arms around her, drawing her up to his height, gripping her trembling ribs, holding her to him. ‘Can’t have you falling off.’

  But she wanted to fall.

  Boxer paced up and down outside Isabel Marks’s house in Kensington. He hadn’t called to say he was coming. He was struggling against a resistance in himself at appearing weak at the beginning of their relationship. Then again, she’d revealed everything of herself to him during the kidnap. He’d been her rock then, and she’d clung to him. But he didn’t like it the other way round. Never been in this position before: needing someone.