Incinerator (7 page)

“Sorry,” I said.

“So what was you up to anyway?”

“I had some business in town.”

“With that Nicky?”

“No, I didn’t see Nicky.”

He seemed relieved. If only he knew.

Half an hour later the gym was throbbing with activity, and I was busy extracting a bent pin from the bottom of a massive pile of weights some macho twerp had dropped while showing off. I caught the acrid smell of cheap tobacco and looked round.

Sherwood’s greasy gopher Elvis was swaggering down the aisle between the running machines like he owned the place, or soon would, a lit roll-up glued to the corner of his mouth. I looked over at the front desk. Daisy was staring at me, her face pale with fear. I didn’t like to think what Elvis had said to her when she’d tried to stop him entering.

Elvis paused in front of a treadmill where
Pam, one of our regulars, was running. He smirked as he watched her breasts bounce, tapping ash from his roll-up onto the floor.

I walked up behind him and plucked the stub from his fingers, and when he turned I screwed it out on the lapel of his leather jacket. “No smoking,” I said, and offered him the crumpled stub. He ignored it.

“Nice place you have here,” he said, glancing back at Pam, whose face was now bright red, and not from exertion. “Is it insured?” Subtle he wasn’t.

“Members only,” I said, “and I don’t think you’d pass the physical.”

Delroy emerged from the changing room, and when he saw me talking to Elvis he stopped and braced himself, as if I was going to send Elvis over to him.

“Mr. Sherwood says hello.” Elvis smiled at me, as if I might have forgotten who he worked for. His teeth were the same sickly shade of yellow as his fingers.

“Tell him he can send a postcard next time,” I said. “I’ll see him tomorrow, like we arranged.”

“Today,” he said. I might have blinked.
Surely Sherwood hadn’t heard already about Nicky stealing my money? “Like, now,” said Elvis.

“I’m busy,” I said. I needed time to go to the Law Society offices and sort out my compensation claim. I didn’t want to turn up in Sherwood’s joint clutching an IOU. Also I didn’t want him to think I would jump whenever he clicked his fingers. Then again, I didn’t want it to look like I was avoiding him, either. “I’ll see him at four,” I said.

Elvis shrugged like he didn’t give a damn, coughed, cleared his throat and spat on the floor. Then he turned on his heel and walked out. As he passed Delroy he gave a cheery nod like they were old mates, but kept walking. I went to fetch the bloodstained mop.

“Finn?” asked Delroy. “What the hell you up to now?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. Worrying wasn’t going to help. Talking to Delroy might have helped, but it was too late for that.

“I’ve printed out the form for you,” said the helpful bloke at the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority. He looked younger than me, in a
pinstriped suit that was too big for him, and his big head wobbled on his skinny neck like those nodding dogs you sometimes see on the back shelves of cars driven by old ladies in strange hats.

I picked up the form. I really hated forms, though this one at least wasn’t as densely packed with gibberish as the ones Nicky used to wave at me. My reluctance must have been obvious from the way I held it, because the clerk piped up, “It’s only six pages long. And three of those are a diversity survey. You know, race, sexual orientation—they’re not strictly necessary.”

“And how long will it take to get compensation?”

I was trying to avoid looking directly at his face because of its magnificent crop of pimples, but I saw him grin proudly. “We aim to deal with your case within thirty days as a rule. Unless it’s complicated. But from what you’ve said, this doesn’t sound complicated.”

“Thirty days?” He didn’t seem to notice the desperation in my voice.

“If you fill it in now, I’ll submit it straight away. Do you need a pen?”

Ignoring his acne I stared at him. Was there any point explaining that in thirty days’ time I might well be in plaster from the neck down, eating my meals through a straw?

“You can take the form home with you if you prefer.”

Back at Nicky’s building, a few streets away, the receptionist tried to tell me the offices of Hale and Vora were closed, but I wasn’t having any of it. From where I stood I could see Vora in a cubicle at the back, photocopying a heap of papers, and I insisted on talking to him. Perhaps the receptionist was too mad to care, because Nicky had done a bunk without paying her bills, but she let me through.

Maybe Nicky didn’t want me to find her, and maybe she did think I’d get my money back. Or maybe somebody had got to her. Either way I had to know, and that meant following every lead I could find.

Vora stared at me with trepidation when I entered. He seemed less panic-stricken than the last time I’d seen him, and had recovered some of his style, but his skin was grey with stress and he looked tired and old. I felt sorry
for him, till I remembered that he had got out of the firm when it was still solvent. Probably with a generous pension.

“I’ve just been to the Law Society and the SRA,” I said.

He nodded in resignation. “You should get compensation, Finn,” he said. “It’s an open-and-shut case.”

“You think so?”

“I—don’t know what you mean.”

“Do you really believe Nicky would do a runner?”

“Last week, I would never have believed it, no.”

“Did you know she was getting death threats? Via email?”

“Yes, I knew. She used to be on Twitter, and Facebook, but the abuse got so bad she gave them up. It happens, especially to women.”

“Why didn’t she report it?”

“She did, for all the difference it made.”

“And she never found out who was behind it?”

“Some creep. You can’t respond to these idiots—she never took it seriously.”

“Maybe she should have.”

Vora thought about what that meant and frowned.

“What cases was she working on?” I asked.

“She mostly dealt in corporate affairs, nothing high-profile or controversial. But she did have a few personal clients, like you …”

“Any chance you could put me in touch with these other clients?”

“That would be unethical. Unprofessional—I could get struck off.”

“So what? I thought you’d retired.” Vora rubbed his forehead, looking older by the minute. “Look,” I said, “I’m not convinced Nicky ran off with my money, and I don’t think you are either. If she didn’t, something must have happened to her, possibly connected to a case she was working on. I just need to get into her office, take a look at her correspondence …” Though at my reading speed, looking at it would be all I could do, I thought.

Vora chewed his lip, torn between doing the legal thing and doing the right thing. “You don’t need to get into her office,” he said at last. He glanced through the glass walls towards the reception area, but no one was
watching. “I’ve been copying her case files, so I could pass her clients over to another firm. The police will expect to see the originals, but these …” He gathered up the copies he had stacked on the table and dropped them into the two box files. “I’ll just copy them again,” he said. “But don’t mention my name. I don’t know how you got hold of these, OK?”

There were a few empty cartons lying about that had originally held photocopy paper. Vora clipped the box files shut and handed them to me, and I wedged them into the cardboard box.

“Good luck,” he said.

“I’ll find her,” I said. “Or I’ll find out what happened to her.”

“If something did happen …” Vora hesitated. “Watch out it doesn’t happen to you too.”

They were only legal papers, but the weight of the files nearly pulled my arms out of their sockets before I made it as far as the Tube and finally got to rest the box on my lap. The carriage rumbled and rocked and swayed
westwards, the other passengers playing on their smartphones or staring into space, while I peeked into the box.

At school I’d eventually been diagnosed as dyslexic, but by the time they’d organized remedial classes I’d been expelled for fighting … and dealing drugs, and criminal damage. There were adult remedial classes I could take now, but I’d never got around to it because I couldn’t be bothered and I was too embarrassed. Now I wished I’d swallowed my pride; it was going to take me months to read all these. I didn’t have Sherwood’s money, and I would barely have time to dump this lot at the gym before my appointment at his plush brothel of an office over the pool hall. I counted my options: I could tell Sherwood I needed more time, I could tell him to go ride a donkey, or I could follow Nicky’s example and disappear … any or all of which would leave Delroy and Winnie in the firing line.

I didn’t have any options at all.

Sean the Wardrobe smirked when he saw me standing on the doorstep outside Sherwood’s offices, like he knew something I didn’t. I
studied the bruise on his face. “It hardly shows now,” I said. “Did you dab a bit of Estée Lauder on it?” The smirk wilted into a sulky glower and he stood back to let me go first up the stairs. At Sherwood’s office he reached past me to open the door, without knocking this time, and I wondered why until I realized Sherwood was not behind his big desk. Elvis was there, though, perched on the same unit in the corner, like a pet lizard. He said nothing, just watched me, and I guessed this was another of Sherwood’s games.

My mum had taken me to the dentist once, when I was about eight, to get a tooth extracted. I knew it was going to be painful and I wanted to get it over with, but this particular jerk of a dentist seemed to go out of his way to prolong the anticipation to screaming point. I had sat waiting in the padded chair for what seemed like a day and a half, staring at a rack full of gas cylinders and some dubious-looking chemical flask with a long clear tube leading to a mask, while Mum tried to distract me with daft questions about my favourite video games. I was reminded of that experience now.

Already I was getting less respect than on my last visit. Sherwood knew something was up.

“Flynn, hey,” said Sherwood as he appeared from a door in a recess beyond his desk, shrugging on his jacket. He was wearing a different suit, as sharply cut as the first. In his line of work I didn’t imagine he took a lot of board meetings or did many media interviews, so presumably the designer labels were all about image, and pretending to be a legitimate businessman when he was anything but. “Dean, get me a coffee, would you?” Elvis sniffed and left the room. So his name was Dean? Maybe he modelled himself on that old movie star James Dean—though they had nothing in common beyond the pout and the quiff and the mumble.

Sherwood had got my name wrong and pointedly not offered me a drink—silly slights intended to needle me. When I was eight I had tried to snatch the forceps from the dentist and do it myself, and now I felt the same impulse.

“I don’t have the money, Mr. Sherwood. And I won’t be able to get hold of it by tomorrow.”

“Ah,” said Sherwood. He sounded disappointed that I’d cut short the foreplay.

“My lawyer’s disappeared, and she had access to my accounts.”

“That’s one I hadn’t heard before,” said Sherwood. “But how exactly is it my problem?”

I took my wallet out of my pocket, tugged my credit card from its pocket and offered it to Sherwood. He looked at it as if his new kitten had brought him half a rotten rat from the garden.

“There’s nearly nine thousand pounds in that account,” I said.

“
Nearly
nine thousand?”

“Eight and a half,” I admitted. Nicky had set it up for me so I would always have access to some cash, and I’d rarely taken out more than forty quid a week—I hated having more than that in my wallet. I did wonder why Nicky hadn’t cleaned out that account too, but then she had been in a hurry. “The PIN is six-seven-four-three.”

“And you expect me to go to some machine outside a supermarket and stand in line to collect the money you owe me. Is that it?”

“I’d give you all of it now, but my lawyer has to countersign the cheques.”

“And what’s to stop you phoning your bank and getting that card stopped?”

“I’m not going to do that. I’m not stupid,” I said.

“Really? Because that’s not the impression I’m getting.” Elvis—Dean, rather—giggled. He had reentered silently behind me, and now he placed a china cup of coffee of Sherwood’s desk, slopping some into the saucer. He wasn’t good waiter material. I stuffed the card back in my wallet. So much for that idea.

“You came to my office, Flynn,” said Sherwood. “You made me a business proposition, which I accepted, and now—just one day later—you’re offering me a fraction of what I’m entitled to?”

“It’s the best I can do.”

“I don’t think so. Try harder.”

I was about to tell him about the compensation fund and how I could pay him back in a few weeks, when I realized it would be futile to make excuses and start bleating for terms, and when you were weak it was never good to let it show.

“Why don’t you tell me what you want?” I said.

“I want the money you owe me.”

“Then you’ll have to wait.”

“Maybe I’m getting old and crabby,” said Sherwood, “but I don’t like lippy bloody teenagers telling me what I have to do.” He was genuinely angry, I realized, and on one level I felt glad to have finally got under his skin. “You must take me for a right moron, coming in here and boasting about your pal the Guvnor and how he was looking out for you.”

“I never mentioned McGovern,” I said. “You did.”

That might have been true, but Sherwood didn’t like me pointing it out.

“Who gives a crap?” he shouted. He expected me to flinch, but I’d been shouted at before, by guys a lot scarier than Sherwood. He realized losing his cool wasn’t having the desired effect, and he pulled himself together, and smirked instead. “Your pal McGovern’s over,” he said. “He’s history. His bent cops got caught, and the Feds were so far up his ass they could read his mind.”

He had his facts wrong. The Guvnor’s bent
cop had turned on him and got shot. I knew, because I’d been there, but this wasn’t the time to be picky.

“McGovern’s run off to Siberia or somewhere and he’s not coming back,” sneered Sherwood. “It’s a whole new set of faces now. Ever heard of the Turk?”