Hold Back the Night Read online

  My reasoning is that kids run away for a reason, but this causes a lot of pain, and not normally to that reason but to someone else. Usually, but not always, to a mother. I try to help without hurting the kid, and in the meantime make a living. It isn’t ideal, not for the kid, or the parents, or even for me. It’s not what I dreamed of doing, although I do have reasons, reasons for being on my own, for only doing it the way I want to do it. Most of it is bound up with why I left the police force, and a man who had done something wrong but didn’t have to pay for it. And my brother. I don’t think I’ll do it for ever but right now it seems to suit me as much as anything else I can think of doing. Actually, to tell you the truth, at the moment there isn’t anything else I can think of doing.

  Instead, I called my friend Nicky, who had left me a message on my home machine. I could hear the sound of chairs being taken off tables, and the rush of a dishwasher; he was just opening his bar. Nicky wanted to know if I was around that night but as I was meeting Sharon I had to decline. I sat looking out of my window as we chatted for a while, at the rooftops and the office buildings going all the way down to St Paul’s. Looking out of the window made me think of Donna-Natalie, and the photo of her home. I was glad I’d found her, but I was also glad that she didn’t have to live in that house any more. I hoped that one day she would have the courage to go back there though, and deal with the reason she’d left. I saw her face for a second, changing so quickly and so completely the way it had, like one of those old-fashioned weather houses. I marvelled at how anyone could ever look so cheerful, even for a second, when they were holding inside of them the knowledge that Natalie-Donna was. It depressed me that someone so young had had to take something like that into herself and just accept it as one of the shit things in life, like rain on your birthday or flu.

  I said goodbye to Nicky, telling him that I’d stop by over the weekend.

  ‘Don’t bring that girl Sharon with you though,’ Nicky said. For a second I thought he was serious.

  ‘Why the hell—?’

  ‘Because it disgusts me to think that anyone so beautiful and intelligent should bother hanging around with someone like you.’

  ‘I’ll convey your concern,’ I said. ‘Anyway, are you still seeing that lap dancer?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ was the last thing I heard my friend say. I put the phone down.

  After which I had my shower, letting a tired stream of lukewarm water run all over me. For some reason I picked up a bottle of shampoo that Sharon had left round here, and I used that instead of my shower gel. I don’t know why. The smell of it made me think of her.

  When I was all dry I dressed again and walked back to my car. I parked in the forecourt outside the building I rent my office in, locked the Mazda, and walked up the two flights. My office is opposite the tennis courts up by Highbury Fields in a 1920s clothing factory that looks like an ocean liner and has been broken up into business units, which are mostly occupied by dance companies and small design studios. I keep it because I pay no rent on my flat and can afford a small space to do business from, and because it’s good to have a place to go, on the few occasions when returning home is not advisable. It also gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning, all of my non-personal mail being sent there. I rent a small, light, bare space with a desk, and a phone, a couple of chairs as well as a sofa bed. There are also two filing cabinets, full of people. Mostly young people. Young people I have looked for and found, or else looked for and missed. Young people who have either grown older than they appear there, and changed a lot, or who have stayed the same age as the photos there show them to be. Who will always be that age.

  I followed my footsteps down the empty corridor and then dug in my pocket for my keys. I shut the door behind me and let down the straw blind against the glare coming in from the window. It was still only elevenish, and having already done something that day made me feel hard working and energized. I picked up the mail from the cold wood floor and sat down at the desk to read it. One of the cheques and a rates bill that would not quite get covered by it. There was also a request from a woman to find the son I had found a couple of years ago, and send another picture. I remembered the son; a married man of forty with two young children. I wondered if he was still living in the comfortable semi in Greenwich where I’d seen him before, washing his car on a Sunday with his young daughter to help him. I took out his file and had a quick look at the pictures I’d got.

  I made a couple of notes to myself and leant over my desk to the answerphone. As my finger hit ‘Play’, however, I caught sight of the face of my brother Luke, staring straight at me from the newly framed photo that for the last two weeks had been sitting on my desk. Luke’s face stopped me for a second, until the voice on the machine interrupted my thoughts.

  The voice was a very plummy voice, and it belonged to a Mrs Bradley. She didn’t give a first name. Mrs Bradley said she was waiting in the cafe for me, and could I join her there as soon as I got in? She sounded worried. Or, rather, late for something. I had no idea who Mrs Bradley was, but seeing as the cafe is only four doors along from my office I decided that yes, I could definitely meet her. After Mrs Bradley there was a message from Andy Gold at the Station and then one that surprised me, even though I had actually been expecting one like it for a week or so now. It was from a woman called Lisa March at the Daily Express. Lisa said she would be very pleased if I would call her on a number I didn’t bother writing down.

  I played the messages over, wrote more notes to myself, and walked out into the grey tiled hallway. I smiled at one of the girls who had recently taken the studio next to mine, heading towards it with a can of lemonade in her hand. Then I stopped outside the cafe.

  The cafe exists to serve the business units. It’s small and cheerful with more potted palms than the place really has room for, and is a great help to me. It means that people like Mrs Bradley have a place to wait if I am out or late, and it also means that I manage to maintain a balanced and nutritious diet, largely consisting of coffee and Italian cakes. I looked round the doorway of the cafe, and then stood leaning against the frame. The breakfast rush was over and the lunch rush was an hour away so Ally and Mike, who run the place, only had one customer. I used my incisive powers of deduction to come to the conclusion that this was Mrs Bradley. I watched her for a second, conscious of the fact that, as yet, I knew her but she didn’t know me. It was a little like looking through a camera at someone. When she turned to look at me I walked towards her.

  ‘Mrs Bradley?’ I asked, proffering my hand. ‘William Rucker. Would you like to come into my office?’

  Mrs Bradley stood up and shook my hand but didn’t say anything. I stepped back and held the door for her. Mike, who was cutting sandwiches, gave me an eyebrow as we walked past him.

  Once inside my office I pulled out a chair for Mrs Bradley, walked round the desk, and sat down myself. Mrs Bradley was a well-dressed woman of about forty-two/three, her still dark, shiny hair tied back severely and a handbag over her shoulder even though she was sitting down. She wore a black, fitted skirt suit over an electric-blue silk blouse, and a thin gold necklace round her firm, though slender neck. She had quite a long face, with a good-sized mole an inch below the right corner of her mouth, which some women would have had removed. She was still attractive or, to someone who has a penchant for more mature women, she was now as attractive as she had ever been or was going to be. She sat there with a quiet, detached, slightly furious expression and her back was straight as a nun’s. She didn’t look the sort who would just stop by on the off chance and I wondered why she hadn’t phoned me first to set up an appointment.

  ‘Now then, Mrs Bradley,’ I said, charmingly I felt. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘You can find my daughter,’ she replied. ‘My daughter Lucy. She’s run away from home.’

  Mrs Bradley sounded impatient and rather grudging, as though she hated asking people for things she couldn’t do herself. She had a hard, deep
voice, a touch too loud for my small room. She reached into her bag for a cigarette, which she lit, before adding to the tiny fan of wrinkles heading from her top lip to the bottom of her nose by pulling on it.

  I leant back and opened the window behind me.

  ‘Lucy has always been a difficult child. She hates the countryside and ever since I can remember she’s talked about being where it’s “at”. But then, when she failed her A levels—’

  ‘Please,’ I interrupted, holding up my hands. ‘Just a second.’

  I wanted to tell Mrs Bradley how I worked. She sat quietly while I explained to her that I charged per case, not by the hour, and that no matter what, I would never tell her where her daughter Lucy was. She listened carefully to everything I said and she didn’t seem surprised. She looked at me all the time with hard, grey eyes, the eyes of a successful politician. Or a boxer. Her eyes left me only once and very briefly, to take a look round my office. There wasn’t much to detain them and I don’t think their owner was hugely impressed by what they showed her.

  Without making any comment on what I’d said, Mrs Bradley explained again that Lucy, who was seventeen, had disappeared from the Bradleys’ home in Sussex just over two months ago. She hadn’t been seen since. As she spoke to me, Mrs Bradley seemed curiously removed from what she was saying. She wasn’t the bundle of terror and self-flagellation I was used to calming down over the phone or sitting across from me. She was angry and impatient rather than worried and distraught. She also had very full, and still firm breasts, breasts a little too noticeable to be absolutely proper for a woman of her age and obvious social standing. It was a body slightly too young for its face. I noticed this, you understand, because it is my profession to notice such things. A conscientious investigator has to notice everything.

  I asked Mrs Bradley why she thought her daughter had come to London and she told me she’d found a bus timetable in Lucy’s bedroom. For some reason she pulled it out of her handbag and showed it to me. I looked at it politely, nodded sagely, and then asked her if she was happy with the way I worked, and therefore wanted to employ me.

  Mrs Bradley waited a second, studying me with her lips pursed, like an art critic looking at a bad forgery.

  ’You’re very young,’ she said finally. ‘You don’t look like a private investigator, or whatever it is that you call yourself.’

  I smiled.

  ‘How would you know, Mrs Bradley?’

  ‘I went to Sirius first,’ she stated. ‘They’re all fifty-five, with beer bellies and cheap suits, or shirts with sweat down the sides. You look about thirty, at most, and you don’t look like you own a suit.’

  She stared at me. No longer thirty, quite. I was wearing a white tee shirt with a rip in the front, cut-offs and trainers.

  ‘It’s part of the uniform,’ I told her. ‘When you’re looking for young people it doesn’t pay to look ex-police, even if that’s what you are. In fact you’ve caught me on a good day, I shaved last night.’

  I smiled again. I believe I have a disarming and relaxing smile. Mrs Bradley sat there, looking just as armed as she was before.

  ‘You say you don’t charge until you send the picture?’

  ‘No, but I make you sign a contract saying that you will pay me when I do. It’s binding.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. ’And you don’t concentrate on one case at a time, you look for all the people you take on at once?’

  ‘I go to the places where they are going to be. I can get into them and not look out of place. I don’t care too much about background, or what sort of girl she is, although that can often help. I just know where to look, and I keep looking. There are places in London that young people are drawn to, and I know what they are. Sooner or later I usually run into them or I get a tip-off as to where a particular one might be. That’s if they are there to be found,’ I added. ‘I do OK, I think.’

  I sat back in my chair, trying to look nonchalant, trying not to think of the bank statement I had read that morning. Trying not to think that it might be a lot of fun looking for a seventeen-year-old version of the haughty, attractive woman sitting in front of me.

  ’Well,’ Mrs Bradley said, reluctantly I thought, ’I suppose I have nothing to lose. The police said you were the one, when I asked. Your name was volunteered. Off the record, as the man put it. But tell me this. How much would it cost to hire you exclusively?’ Mrs Bradley looked straight at me. This woman must be into politics at some level: she was treating a very emotional matter as if it were simply a business deal, and she had just ignored everything I had been saying to her. I told her again how I worked, but this time added that that was the only way I worked. I told her she could hire someone else if she wanted, that I had more than enough to do at present. Just as I finished speaking, however, she reached into her bag and took out a cheque book. She opened it and started scribbling.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but I will pay you in advance, and when you find her there will be a bonus. That might make you look harder.’ She scribbled some more and then snapped off the cheque like a gamekeeper putting a rabbit out of its misery.

  Mrs Bradley seemed to have finalized the arrangement. I didn’t argue with her, although I did have the strange and sudden urge to tell this hard, determined lady to hack right off out of it. Instead I opened up a notebook and wrote Lucy’s name at the head of a new page. As I did so I saw Mrs Bradley glance at the cigarette she had hardly touched, the ash piled improbably high like a chimney just before the charge blows. She looked round my desk, presumably for an ashtray, but she was never going to find one. I left her to her discomfort for a second or two and then I leant forward. Very gently I reached out my hand and took the cigarette from her, carefully. I leant backwards towards the window and knocked the ash out of it. Then, just as gently, I placed the cigarette back in her hand, our fingers brushing slightly as the pressure on it was exchanged from me to her. Mrs Bradley held it for a second and then turned away.

  She rummaged in her bag with her free hand, and then handed me a photograph. I was expecting another picture of a posh-looking girl at a party, or outside a nice house in the country, but that is not exactly what I got. The picture was of a girl straddling a stationary motorbike, in a ripped denim jacket and wearing bright red lipstick, sticking the finger up to whoever took the photo. It seemed a strange picture for the austere Mrs Bradley to be handing me. I looked at it, hard, and then I got Mrs Bradley to sign her contract, and write down a few details about her daughter Lucy, her height, what kind of music she liked. I did this as quickly as I could. I had intended to ask her some standard questions about herself and her family, whether Lucy had any friends in London, stuff like that. But I didn’t. I told Mrs Bradley I would call her and that I would be happy to meet her again very soon but that I had an urgent meeting to attend and couldn’t talk to her now. When she’d given me her card and told me when to call, I almost lifted her out of her seat and threw her out of the door. It took some courage, believe me. I pointed her towards the lift. Then, without bothering to lock the office behind me, I took the back stairs six at a time and jumped into the Mazda.

  It started.

  The traffic was a nightmare, especially on the Holloway Road, and I wished I’d had another bike at the office as well as the one I keep at home. My new tee shirt stuck to the back of the seat and rather than a breeze, all that came through the open window was the dirty heat generated from all the other vehicles. When I finally got back to Camden High Street the doorway outside Marks was occupied by a frail old woman trying to play a penny whistle.

  Donna-Natalie was gone.

  I wasn’t surprised really. She’d looked to be making quite a lot of money before and who wants to sit in the baking hot sun all day? But it was a shame. She may have known where the other girl I had seen her talking to hung out.

  The other girl’s name was Lucy. Lucy Bradley.

  I turned the car round. If only I’d had the good sense to snap Lucy, as well as th
e Early Morning Fight Special, I could have earned her mother’s little bonus without leaving the office. Shame. How bizarre, to have seen her like that. As I looked through the rolled down side window at the old woman making thin music from her pile of stained blankets and ragged clothes, I had a sudden image.

  A flash of bright white knickers.

  It’s funny what you see when you’re looking for something else.

  Chapter Four

  I pulled the car into a bus lane and sat for a minute thinking what I should do with myself. It was still only twelve-thirty but it seemed like I’d already had a long day. I wanted another shower; my tee shirt had become a permanent part of my body, and my hands felt slimy on the wheel. But I couldn’t go back home again. I had things to do, I was a detective for God’s sake. I thought about going down to Greenwich but there wouldn’t be any point, not in working hours. I thought about strolling around Camden, seeing if I couldn’t spot Miss Bradley anywhere. Good plan. I parked the car where I’d parked it earlier, slung my bag over my shoulder, and walked up towards the Lock.