Hold Back the Night Read online

  Andy sat back in his chair and scraped his fingernails back through his coal-black hair, with its natural Brylcreem effect. I took the chance to look my former colleague over. Andy didn’t look good, although whether this was the heat, his health, or just the day he was having I couldn’t tell. Andy is one of those people whose appearance can vary dramatically, even on one given day. Working, he always looks like he either just got out of bed, ready dressed, or else had been up all night pulling information out of hapless minor crims in the sort of soul-shivering interview rooms I was all too familiar with. From both sides of the desk. Right now he was wearing a cheap suit, a grubby white button-down and a tie he could have recently taken back from the kittens he had given it to play with some weeks ago. He looked just like a copper and he even smelled like one too. I was getting coffee, smoke, sweat and Dettol. His eyes were tired, and his flat, Mediterranean complexion looked dirty and yellowish. He was putting on weight, and as usual he seemed to be between razors. All in all, Andy was a walking advertisement for a life outside the police force. I knew, however, that if I met him in the pub later, after a shave and brush up, he could well have lost five years and be smelling as sweet as a widow’s handbag.

  ‘You’ll call me if you see her?’ I asked him.

  ‘If I do,’ he said. ‘But I certainly won’t be looking for her. She’s over sixteen, got nothing to do with us. She could be getting banged up the arse by the Archbishop of Canterbury five times a day and we wouldn’t be interested.’

  He put the picture down on the desk.

  ‘A point I’m sure you made to her mother.’

  Andy smiled. ‘Not quite in those terms. We explained our legal problem, but said we’d keep an eye out for her. Let her know if she’s OK, if we happen to run into her.’

  ‘The chances of that being?’

  ‘None. Unless she happens to do something we would be interested in, in which case she is legally entitled to request us not to contact her family.’

  ‘So it’s all down to me then?’

  ‘It is. Thanks to our nanny state legal system you can go and find people and tell whoever you like about it. But not us. We’ve got more rules to go by.’

  That was true. It was why I left. Because I had something to do, something a policeman should have been able to do, but which he couldn’t. Something I had to do as a representative of myself, and no one else.

  ‘I remember,’ I said.

  ‘Really? I don’t remember you remembering.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That there were any rules,’ he said.

  Andy Gold glanced to his left, at the photo frame on my desk, angled just far enough towards him that he could make out a face. He looked surprised.

  ‘Bit odd isn’t it, Billy? Keeping a picture of yourself on your desk? Shouldn’t it be one of that lawyer bird you’re shtupping?’

  I looked from the picture to Andy.

  ‘It’s Luke,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’ Andy raised his eyebrows. He reached over and picked the photo up, holding it on the desk in front of him. He bit his lip.

  ‘I don’t remember you looking this alike,’ he said.

  ‘Some people said we were similar. Others not.’

  ‘Not that I knew him, of course. I only met him once or twice.’ Andy suddenly looked confused. I couldn’t tell if it was real confused or not. I guessed not.

  ‘Wasn’t…? Hmm.’ He stared hard at the picture. ‘I seem to remember that it was your brother who was with that girl, not you. I thought she was his girlfriend, not yours. I must have got it wrong.’

  ‘No,’ I said, evenly. ‘That’s right. She was with Luke. They were engaged.’

  ‘Right,’ Andy said. ‘Right.’ He put the picture back where it was. ‘They were engaged. And she’s with you now?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she is.’

  I sat back in my chair and looked at Andy in a frank, come-on-then-ask-me kind of way. After a second his eyes turned away from me and he put his hands on the sides of his seat.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d better get back on the job. Can’t sit around shooting the breeze with my old mates all day. Thanks for the tea though. I got that Italian piece to put it on your slate. Didn’t have any change.’

  He stood up.

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  ‘And thanks for the other—’

  ‘Or that,’ I said. I looked at him. ‘You don’t have to come all the way over here, you know. I’m happy to meet you. Wherever.’

  ‘Billy!’ Andy said, holding his hands up. ‘You don’t think I come and visit you just to pick up the occasional minor gratuity, do you? Really! What a cynical man you are, Mr Rucker.’

  Andy picked up his mug.

  ‘Better take this back,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t want young Alessandra to think I’d forgotten about her. I bet she’s stood there right now, longing for my return.’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  ‘Yes, undoubtedly.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘By the way. Have you got to her yet?’

  Andy walked out into the hall.

  As his footsteps trailed away I stood up and pushed the door shut. Then I sat down and rummaged through my filing cabinet for a hard-backed A4 envelope. I didn’t exactly relish Andy’s little visits, and would have felt much more comfortable meeting him in a pub somewhere, but it wasn’t difficult to see why Andy came over to my office. I had recently been implicated in a very nasty case involving, among others, rent boys, airline pilots and MPs. There was no way I was guilty of anything, a fact that Andy’s boss had finally had to admit, but even so some very dodgy things had occurred around me. To Ken Clay, Chief Inspector of Islington Police, this made me suspect, something that I had actually been to him ever since I had left his tutelage some years ago.

  ‘I can smell stuff on you,’ he’d once said to me, through a cloud of cigar smoke and Aramis.

  And so Andy came over to see me, because he had enough faith in his own powers of detection to believe that he would somehow be able to tell if I knew something that I wasn’t sharing with the appointed forces of right and just order. I felt it was a shame. I could never admit to having actually liked the man 100 per cent, but when we were working together we had got on pretty well. Friends even. As time went by, however, a professional gap had grown between us. Whereas Andy used to do me favours, which I would compensate him for out of my own sense of obligation, now it was just minor business to him and, more importantly, a good way of keeping tabs on me.

  I found an envelope and addressed it to Mrs Juliet Appleby of Pennerton House, Pennerton, Keswick, Cumbria. Then I slid open the envelope that Carl had given me that morning. I pulled out all the copies, and looked at them, sliding the top set off and setting the duplicates aside. Taking one set, I used a ruler and a scalpel to crop any that gave away anything about the picture’s location. I discarded two that showed some give-away green store-fronting, and I removed from another an old lady who was carrying a bag with the Marks and Spencer name and logo on it. I also cut away the back of a goods van that had a Camden number on the side. I was left with four pictures of Mrs Appleby’s daughter Donna, now known as Natalie, sitting in the doorway of an anonymous shop, in a pair of jeans and a tee shirt. Two of the shots were full body, and the other two were close-ups of the girl’s face. A very pretty face, undoubtedly, in spite of a rather cheap hair dye and the regrettable absence of even one freckle.

  I placed the glossies on top of the addressed envelope, and then took out some headed notepaper from my desk. I took a pen and wrote a description of Donna, as I had seen her. I said that she looked well, appeared cheerful, and that she seemed to be eating. She didn’t look noticeably thinner in my photos than she had in the one her mother had sent me. I said that I had spoken to her and had tried to get her to re-establish contact with her family. Finally, I said that, as the pictures showed, I had found her begging for change, but that I felt she was doing OK, and that while Mrs Appleby was right to be worried ab
out her daughter, a life on the street was not necessarily as bad as she might think, especially if it was only for a while, and the weather was fine.

  I did not tell Mrs Appleby that Donna was now calling herself Natalie. Nor did I say that she had told me the reason for her sudden departure from Pennerton House. Mrs Appleby almost certainly didn’t need to be told what that was.

  I signed the letter, folded it, then slid it into the envelope on top of the photographs. I stamped it and left it on the front of my desk for posting. Then I picked up the remaining pictures, intending to file them, and it was only as I did so, noticing their comparative weight, that I remembered the other shots I’d taken. Of the kid in the alley. I’d forgotten to tell him not to bother, so Carl had made duplicates of these as well. I took them from the bottom of the pile and spread them out on the table, for no other reason than I was curious. They meant nothing to me, except for the fact that when a fifty-year-old man beats the hell out of a kid in his teens, something has to be awry. If I were Ken Clay I would have said that I could smell something. It was the sort of smell that even an ex-policeman finds difficult to ignore.

  I had shots of the kid on the floor, and two of the kid successfully dodging a couple of hay-makers, one with a duck and the other with a nice pivot backwards from the waist. I also had a clear shot of the man, standing at the mouth of the alley after the kid had legged it. He was standing with his hands on his hips and a look of pure disgust on his face. I suddenly wondered something that hadn’t occurred to me at the time: was he the boy’s father? He could have been. Was he mad at the boy for something; for smoking, or talking back, or coming in late? Was that his idea of administering a reprimand to his teenage son?

  I didn’t know. At the time I hadn’t stopped to think what was going on. My sympathies were all with the kid; he was the one getting the kicking. But I’d only been in at the denouement, I hadn’t seen the whole play. I looked into the man’s face. Was his disgust at letting the kid escape, or for what the kid had done, or even directed at himself, for the violence he had used? I didn’t know. Maybe he’d caught him trying to rip off a car, or shooting up, or skipping school again. Maybe he’d had too much, nothing else had worked. Maybe he’d just cracked, after years of trying to deal with the boy more reasonably.

  Or maybe he was just a vicious bastard, whether he was related to the boy or not.

  It was a habit of mine to draw things out, to let my mind run down avenues of its own invention starting from an incident, or a picture. I did it with the kids I came across, those I held in my viewfinder for a second and then let go again. What did they do when I’d turned away from them? I tried to trace them out, the friends they had, the things that were precious to them. I watched them sitting in doorways and wondered what they thought of the people who gave them money, and of those who didn’t. Or not to sit in doorways but to stand in them, and then to give head in the back of BMW estate cars littered with picnic rugs and plastic footballs, beneath the gaze of stuffed Garfield toys sticking to the windows. And the men who drove these cars home, a half hour late, what did they think, sitting in front of EastEnders, saying yes, love, no, love, have you done your homework yet?, a gin and tonic hissing on a coaster, waiting for the ping of the microwave?

  I gathered up the pictures and put them back in the envelope Carl had given me. I didn’t know where to file them so I put them in with Donna Appleby. Then I walked out into the hall and locked up my office behind me. I had begun to think about Lucy Bradley, and the kind of life she might have been living over the last two months. But I didn’t want to imagine it, to make it up in my head. I wanted to find it out.

  Chapter Seven

  I walked round Camden again and still didn’t get anywhere. It was busier, and even hotter than the day before, but still not that crowded. I did run into Olly though, who was selling the Big Issue outside the tube station. I gave him the twenty I owed him for Donna, and then showed him the picture of the girl on the motorcycle; the lipstick, the hand held low, the finger. Olly had hardly glanced at it when he started to laugh. He even laughed with a Mane accent.

  ‘You’re asking if I’ve seen her? This bird?’

  I nodded. Olly twisted a thin finger round the long, wispy goatee that made him look as though someone had recently conjured him up out of a tree. The effect was intensified by his eyes, which are the brightest, most disconcerting blue I have ever seen. You got the impression that if you were to look away from Olly, even for just a second, when you turned back he might be gone, having simply vanished into the air.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve seen her.’

  ‘When?’ I said.

  ‘’Bout five minutes ago as a matter of fact.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Where!?’ I looked round quickly. ‘Here?’

  ‘No,’ Olly said, holding up his armful of magazines. ‘Here.’

  He handed me a copy and I opened it.

  ‘Towards the end,’ he said, enjoying my disappointment. ‘Before the classifieds.’

  I flipped to the end and saw what Olly meant. There were three photographs on the ‘Missing’ page, and Lucy’s was one of them. Her sarcastic grin greeted me alongside the face of a worried-looking middle-aged woman, and the broad smile of a young pale-skinned black boy, probably not yet in his teens. The editor had cropped the photo, however, so that only Lucy’s face was included, not her expressive left hand. It wasn’t only me who censored his pictures, it seemed.

  ‘That’ll be a pound please, sir,’ Olly said.

  I looked at him.

  ‘It’s not like W.H. Smith,’ he said. ‘You can’t browse through the material and then decide you don’t want it.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘of course not.’ I dug him out a coin. ‘But, Olly, if you do see her…?’

  ‘I will immediately call the Missing Persons Helpline, as instructed there.’

  ‘You do that, Olly, by all means, and see what they give you for it.’

  ‘No, you’re all right as it goes. I’ll give you a bell.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He looked down at the magazine I was still holding.

  ‘I’d never call that lot,’ he said, with unexpected venom.

  ‘Oh. Why not?’

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘You don’t snitch on them, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t tell them where they are.’ He took the magazine out of my hand. ‘You know what,’ he said, ‘every time this comes out I look at this page and I’m bloody terrified, and d’you know why? It’s because I’d fucking hate to see my picture there. My own face. Knowing people might see me and call that number. I wouldn’t go out for a week.’

  We were interrupted by a girl who wanted to buy a copy. Olly handed me back mine and gave one to the girl, with a smile. When she was gone he said, ‘They’re bringing out a special “Missing” Issue soon, full of people. I don’t agree with it. I was an abused child. I haven’t seen my parents for six years and I never want to see them. Not fucking ever. It’s not for us,’ he said, ‘that number. It’s for the bastards who fucked us up, and what I say is, let ‘em suffer. Let ‘em suffer not knowing. That’s what I think. Because it’s like, what are they going to say to me? “I’m sorry, darling. Won’t you come home?” I don’t think so.’

  Olly shook his head and looked to the side, suddenly embarrassed. I thanked him for his time and took another walk up to the Lock.

  Before leaving Camden I found a phone box, which was down a side street and therefore relatively quiet. I didn’t want to use my office phone. I asked directory enquiries for the number of Lloyd’s Bank, in Arundel, Sussex. I wrote the number down and then dialled it. I asked to be put through to accounts.

  ‘Hello, Jane Hart speaking.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Hart,’ I said. ‘My name’s Inspector Clay, of the Met’s missing persons unit, and I was wondering if you can help me.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’ Jane’s voice was clear, and hopeful.

  �
�You might want to write down my warrant number,’ I said. ‘It’s WXC358769.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Now then. I’m trying to trace a young girl called Lucy Bradley, who has an account at your branch.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jane said, uncertainly, ‘I understand. Yes.’

  ‘She has been missing for a while now, and I want to try and get a hold on her recent movements. I was wondering if you could tell me if there have been any cashpoint withdrawals from her account, and if so, their location.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Miss Hart?’

  ‘Sorry, Inspector. It’s just that these requests are supposed to be put in writing.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘they are usually, yes. But the delay caused often means the information we receive is useless. I think we’re close to tracing Miss Bradley, but these young people move around a lot, do you see?’

  ‘Yes, yes I do.’

  ‘So you see my problem. And I can assure you that we have the full co-operation of her mother and father, and indeed that of her sister Emma, who is very keen that we find Lucy.’

  Another pause.

  ‘Yes, Inspector. Yes. I know the family. It’s a small town.’

  I was hoping this would be the case.

  ‘So you will perhaps be able to appreciate what the Bradleys are going through right now.’

  ‘Yes, yes I can. But—’

  ‘You can contact the family by all means. I’ll hold. I have a number for them.’

  She thought about it. Then: ‘Well, no, I can’t do that. But if you wait a moment. I can’t really see the harm.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said.

  In a lowered voice, Jane told me that Lucy had made three withdrawals from her account, in the last week, all from the same machine, and all of the maximum amount her account would allow; one hundred pounds on each occasion. Her account was now in the red, and drawing very close to its overdraft limit.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘I’ll suggest that Mrs Bradley supplies more funds to the account, but also lowers the weekly limit on it. Thanks very much for your help.’