Hold Back the Night Read online

  I tried to send my mind back fourteen years.

  ‘I didn’t think the A-level results were out yet. I mean, how did Lucy know she hadn’t done well? I mean definitely?’

  ‘She didn’t write anything,’ Emma said, after a second or two. ‘She just sat there looking at the papers. Apparently she didn’t even write her name at the top. She didn’t even show up for the last one.’

  I nodded again. ‘How did you know? About her not writing anything? Did she tell you?’

  ‘I …’ Emma hesitated. ‘I was in the same hall. At least for History and English. I wasn’t sitting next to her but my friend Clare was both times, and she told me. I…’

  The swell rose up again but this time Emma contained it, quickly getting hold of herself. She blinked strongly, forcing air into her lungs. There was a definite look of steel in her face and I saw a resemblance to her mother that I hadn’t noticed up till then. She also had that preoccupied look that told of thoughts way off to the side, intruding on the centre. She held them back.

  ‘I think I made her run away,’ Emma said, her voice strong and even.

  I shook my head. ‘How, Emma? Did you have a fight?’

  She nodded. ‘At home. We were always having fights, at least we used to. Now we just don’t talk much at all. But we had a fight and after Lucy said something nasty about me I just yelled back that at least I’d finished my A levels.’

  ‘And that made her leave home? I don’t think—’

  ‘Mum heard. She came and asked me what I meant and I told her. I told her what Clare said, about leaving the papers blank. I knew I shouldn’t have told her but I wanted to. I really wanted to hurt Lucy, and it was the only way I could think of. Lucy’s normally so…so untouchable. And Mum went mad, she went really mad. Lucy ran out of the house and she never came back.’

  I looked at Emma and shook my head again and smiled. I remembered how important we think we are when we’re young, how we think we’re the cause of everything.

  ‘You weren’t to blame,’ I said. ‘And you know it really. No one runs away for this long after one argument. What would have happened when the results came out, your mother would have found out then, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Emma said.

  ‘These things build up, they don’t just happen. But I can understand why you want to find Lucy.’ I felt like telling her that I’d seen her sister, that she was all right. I was about to when Emma cut me off.

  ‘I’m glad you stopped me following you though,’ she said, thinking about it. ‘I am. I’d have probably messed it up with Lucy if I’d spoken to her. Actually, no probably about it.’

  Fred’s was getting busier now, as the pubs were shut. The noise level had increased and the manager had turned up the sound system to counter it. Just then, two men asked if they could share our table. We moved up for them. When we settled down again Emma was smiling at me.

  ‘I’m glad I saw you as well as Mum,’ she said.

  My faced must have registered something.

  ‘How was it with her?’

  ‘Scary,’ I admitted.

  ‘She’s OK though,’ Emma said, quickly.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘It’s just that she never shows her feelings to people. She’s odd that way.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I could tell that underneath she really does care about Lucy.’ Could I tell that?

  ‘She runs her own company, you know, a software firm. She’s always doing things, making things happen, telling people what to do, where to go. I’m glad I saw you as well. I want to show you how upset we are. I want to ask you to really try to find Lucy. Not tell you the way Mum probably did.’

  Emma’s focus shifted again.

  ‘And if you do find her, will you tell her something, just from me? Will you tell her that I’m sorry?’

  ‘We’ve already established that it wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘I know, but not for that. I don’t know.’ Emma looked me hard in the face. ‘I want you to tell her that I’m sorry for who I am.’

  ‘I’m not sure…’

  ‘There are photographs of us at home,’ she explained. ‘When we were little. Together. In some of them, no one, not even Lucy or I, can tell who is who. I can’t tell you how weird that is. At junior school we used to have to wear name tags. Lucy, of course, made fake ones with my name on to get me into trouble. But even though we looked the same, I always knew we were different, really different. We used to fight like hell, all the time. Lucy was so high-spirited, always getting told off. I was quieter, I worked hard at school and got better grades than she did. She used to say that it was all crap, that all they were teaching us was how to think like them, and seeing as they were a bunch of flabby failures what was the point? I remember her making that very point when we were fourteen. To the geography teacher.’ Emma smiled. ‘She hated the fact that anyone should have control over her.

  ‘Outside school, if we were out anywhere, Lucy always took charge. She knew what to say to people. She was so confident it was amazing. And then, when it came to boys…’

  Emma laughed to herself at some memory. And then another one came like a wave crashing into it and she laughed even more.

  ‘She was outrageous. Mum was always catching her. She slept with the art teacher, though Mum never found out about that. She used to sneak out of the flat we’ve got in London and I’d hear her come in again at three in the morning. Once I was at home on my own, on a Sunday afternoon, and when I went into my bedroom there was this naked man on my bed. Lucy had given him a key and told him that my bedroom was hers. He didn’t know about me and her being twins and he just wouldn’t believe I wasn’t Lucy. He grabbed me, and started trying to kiss me. I screamed like anything and eventually phoned the police and he ran down the drive trying to put his trousers on.’

  I let Emma finish her story and then stop laughing. I didn’t think it especially funny. It could have had a different ending.

  ‘I was the classic quiet one, you see. And I always got As in everything. And everyone always used to tell her to be more like me.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And that used to really bug me. Can you imagine, in class, or at parents’ evening or bringing our reports home together, can you imagine how it made me feel? And I was just as jealous of her! I even tried a bit of rebellion of my own but it just didn’t feel like me. I didn’t like smoking and I don’t like clubs much. Dope didn’t do anything for me and I’m too scared to try anything else. I was always a haircut behind, too. I guess I’m just the square one.’

  ’Me too then,’ I said, ‘at least these days.’

  Emma smiled. Then she looked serious again. She rested her hands on the table.

  ‘I want you to tell Lucy that I’m sorry I was always there for people to point out how useless they thought she was.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell her if I can.’

  ‘And tell her too that I don’t think she’s useless. And I never, ever thought she was.’

  The two guys sharing our table had a friend who’d dragged a stool over and pretty soon it was their table not ours. I didn’t mind; there wasn’t really anything else Emma had to say to me, although she did go on telling me about various scrapes her sister had got herself into. Eventually I excused myself and went to find Alberto to get the bill, but Emma followed and insisted on paying it. I couldn’t dissuade her, and it felt odd to be bought a drink by a seventeen-year-old girl, especially as Emma did it somewhat awkwardly. I stood next to her as she searched in her purse for enough pound coins.

  Alberto looked at me strangely the whole time. I could tell he was trying to add up everything he’d seen that day in relation to the young girl and me. And Sharon, I suppose. He’s an Italian, so I didn’t have much doubt as to what his conclusion would be. He tried to catch my eye as I followed Emma to the door but I ignored him, and didn’t look back as I shut the door behind me.

  Outside it was warm and the s
ky was unusually clear for London. Orion stood up in front of us, tall and naked. Apart from him, there weren’t many people about. I walked Emma back down to her car, and we chatted away, and as we did so I got a feeling that I get only very rarely. It was a feeling of animosity towards the person I was looking for. I saw her again, Lucy, walking down the street looking sassy and cool, a summer chick. And here was her sister, wrung tight with guilt just because she was a pleasant girl people got on with, and she got good grades at school. I was sure that if I ever met Lucy she would give me ample reasons for her behaviour but at that moment I didn’t know them. I was just trailing in her wake amongst the debris.

  Emma thanked me for listening to her. She said that talking about Lucy had really helped. I said anytime, if she was in London. She said she would be, until Lucy turned up. I gave her directions back to Chalk Farm and then watched her drive away up Lloyd Baker Street.

  At home I took off my shoes and sat for a while. I left the lights off and just sat in the dark staring at the ceiling. I did my best not to think about anything. One thing in particular. I sat there for an hour or two, maybe more, letting the small sounds of my flat, and the muffled sounds of London run through my head. I flicked a lamp on and tried reading the Tao Te Ching, but nothing in it grabbed me. Eventually I got up and went to bed. And then I couldn’t help it any longer; my thoughts went back to the restaurant, and to Sharon, that smile she’d given me as the taxi drove away. A quiet, dark lake sat heavy inside me so that I didn’t sleep for a long time.

  Chapter Six

  I got up the next morning quite late, at tennish, and after making a couple of calls I wandered down the empty market to the Sand Bar for my breakfast. The refuse strike had spread from Camden to Islington over the last few days, and already the bags were beginning to pile up. They looked like blackheads, bursting up through the paving slabs. It was a relief to get inside the Sand Bar, where the cement floor seems to keep the place cool. It was also a relief to find it quiet, which it generally is at that time of day. I sat on a bench to the left side of the plain white room with a coffee and some raisin bread, reading the paper for a while but not really engaging with it. I was thinking about Sharon. I’d thought we’d finally managed to sort out everything concerning Luke and her, and me. I couldn’t help wondering what these new doubts she had were about. She’d been so defensive. Being with her last night had been like cruising on an open sea and hitting a rock I had no idea was there.

  There was nothing I could do about it though, at least not for the moment, so I turned my thoughts to Emma Bradley instead. I was glad I’d spoken to her. Having done so gave me a clearer picture of her sister. She was a party girl, someone likely to be where she thought it was at. A provincial girl only in the city for a couple of months, but who would try to get into the swing of things as quick as possible, maybe through a boyfriend. She’d certainly looked confident enough of her surroundings, strolling along Camden High Street, and the fact that she hadn’t had any stuff with her meant that she must have had somewhere to stay.

  But like Emma I was also glad to have spoken to her because it made the whole thing more human. Sometimes, when I’m busy, my job can seem very functional, like tagging birds. Just find them, snap them, send the picture. But I only had one other case on at the moment, which was probably going to be pretty simple, and it gave me an added spur to meet the twin sister of the girl I was looking for. I no longer felt any animosity towards her, and it felt odd that I had, having only ever got one fleeting glimpse of her. Who knows what she was thinking? It all seemed like a whole series of crossed wires to me, and it would make me feel good to pass on her sister’s message to her.

  I picked up the pictures of Donna-Natalie from Carl and drove up through Islington towards Highbury Fields. The Earl of Warwick, which had closed a month ago, had reincarnated itself in the form of yet another of those tacky ‘Irish’ theme pubs. Christ. Upper Street was no longer a street but a theme park, with all the standard, patented generic leisure experiences where once there were places to go and have a drink, or something to eat. Were people really that easy to satisfy? Were they really so lonely, so scared of the city that everything had to be immediately recognizable? Or was it just the simple disease of the age? Pure, unadulterated laziness.

  I drove past O’Neills, and All Bar One, and the Pitcher and Piano, the Something and Firkin, the Slug and Lettuce, the Dome, Cafe Rouge, Nachos, Pizza Hut, and all three branches of Oddbins that the street supports. What these places all used to be before being bought out and gutted I didn’t know. If once I did know, now I’ve forgotten. What would be the point of remembering?

  Once in my office I drank half a litre of mineral water and took four deep breaths. Then I dialled the number Emma’s mother had given me the day before, and also left on my machine that morning. I was confronted once again with the arresting tones of Mrs Bradley.

  ‘Ah, Mr Rucker. Any progress on Lucy?’

  Mrs Bradley’s voice still sounded too big for my office. I didn’t like the way it seemed to get right at me, put me on my back foot.

  ‘Maybe,’ I admitted. ‘It’s going to take a bit longer than a day though.’

  ‘As long as you’re doing everything you can.’

  ‘You can count on it, Mrs Bradley. Now, I need to know if this is a permanent number that I can reach you on.’

  ‘For the time being. Either myself or my husband will be here or else there will be an answering machine I can access.’

  ‘I see. I take it that you own the flat then.’

  ‘We do, but I don’t see—’

  ‘So Lucy will have been there before with you?’

  ‘Many times.’

  ‘Right. Where is your flat?’

  ‘Oh, it’s in Chalk Farm. Near Primrose Hill.’

  ‘And did Lucy ever stay there alone at all?’

  ‘No, never. We only ever came to London as a family. Or else I came alone on business.’

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘Never. He works from home. In Sussex. But I can’t—’

  ‘I see. So, when you came to London, were there any areas that Lucy seemed particularly keen on?’

  There was silence for a second. I liked the sound of it.

  ‘Well, I don’t know, I mean, we just used to go to museums and to restaurants. I used to take the girls shopping. I may not have told you that I have another daughter, Emma.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘So nowhere Lucy took a particular shine to?’

  ‘Not that I can think of,’ Mrs Bradley said.

  ‘Or any shops she was particularly keen to visit?’

  Another silence.

  ‘Camden,’ Mrs Bradley said finally. ‘Lucy went to Camden once with James. No, a couple of times. My husband. While I was at a meeting. It was a terrible mistake, especially the second time. She talked him into buying her some truly horrible clothes.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  Camden.

  I allowed myself a smile.

  I didn’t think that Lucy was going to be too hard to find. Neither did I have a lot more to ask my employer because Emma had told me what kind of girl Lucy was last night. Mrs Bradley didn’t seem to know that Emma had recently failed her entrance test for MI5 and I couldn’t see the point of mentioning it. I didn’t think Mrs Bradley would be angry with her daughter for following me, but she probably would have been for not telling her. And more so for getting caught. After asking her what bank her daughter used, and the name of her branch, I told Mrs Bradley that I would get in touch when I had any more to tell her.

  It was almost midday. Andy Gold had told me earlier that he’d be by before then so I figured he wasn’t coming. It wasn’t as if it was urgent, at least not for me. I wandered down the corridor for a quick coffee and was surprised to see him in the cafe, leaning up against the counter with a mug of tea in his hand. He was talking to Ally. Ally was laughing, quite obviously insincerely, at something he’d said, her arms folded, her mouth op
en a little to reveal teeth that all pointed inward ever so slightly. My little shark, as Mike called her, when he wanted to annoy. She turned, relieved, and smiled her perfect smile when she saw me walk in.

  Andy put his half-empty mug down.

  ‘Billy,’ he said. ‘So you are in.’

  ‘Coffee, Billy?’

  ‘Thanks, Ally.’

  Ally reached behind her for my special mug, the one with Kojak on the side, which she and Mike had brought me back from New York, and given me for my birthday. It is a good, big, mug, thick enough to keep the coffee warm. What’s more, Kojak’s lollipop changes colour when you pour the coffee in.

  Ally’s long slim hand reached towards me with the cup and then went to put a tick in her tally book. It then pushed a coil of curly black hair behind a pale, delicate ear, revealing a small gold, tear-shaped earring. Andy stood beside me. He followed me across the small room, and when I held the door for him, he turned back and winked at her.

  ‘Who loves ya, baby?’ he said.

  Ally’s professional smile again, wearing thinner. I lifted my eyes towards her before following Andy out into the hall.

  The sun had eased round to batter the other side of the building, so I pulled my blind up. I pushed the window open further. I sat down, and as Andy sipped his tea I reached into the bottom drawer of my desk and slipped out a fifty-pound note from beneath a copy of Hunger, which Luke had once given me. I left it on the corner of my desk while Andy inspected his fingernails, and went out to use the toilet. When I came back it was gone.

  ‘Pretty, isn’t she?’

  Andy was holding a photo of Lucy Bradley. My copy was still in my bag so it must have been one her mother gave to the police. It was the same shot.

  ‘I’m not sure pretty’s the word,’ I said.

  ‘No. Not pretty. Pretty stunning. A tough life is it, Billy, trawling the streets for this kind of thing?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘I tell you what though, mate, I wouldn’t mind a finder’s fee paid in that, I can tell you. Wonder what I’d get for fifty quid though?’