Missing, Presumed (16 page)

The other passengers stare at her as she presses a tissue against her eyes, trying to stop the tears and failing, knowing that her face must be a torn-up storm of anger, regret, and defensiveness.

Edith has never been quick to forgive. Is this what her disappearance is all about – one huge sulk, like the one in Fenwick’s? Oh, she hopes so. She’d be happy to know Edith is alive and to never talk to her again. Anything, but not dead.

The wedding, at the church at the bottom of Church Row, had been so beautiful, Christy vastly pregnant in white, with a ring of flowers around her hair. Miriam and Edith sat together in a pew, and when Miriam looked to her left at Edith’s face, the tears were streaming from her daughter’s eyes and her mouth was a soundless red twist.

‘So, Taylor Dent,’ says DI Sean Haverstock – ‘Havers’ as he seems to be called by everyone at Kilburn CID. He is bouncing back in his swivel chair. Manon guesses he’s about her age: bald, wearing a wedding ring.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘where are we with his movements in the week before he died?’

‘Nowhere, to be honest, without some decent phone work. His was pay-as-you-go, basic, not a smart phone. That’s disappeared. Registered activity in the North London area up until Sunday, eleventh of December, but that’s as you would expect.’

She nods. ‘That ties in with the PM’s time of death.’

‘Phone was then either lost, switched off, or destroyed.’

‘Who’s coming up on the call data?’

‘You’ll be surprised to hear that it was almost entirely PAYG unregistered. Dirty phones. His world—’

‘We don’t seem to know much about his world,’ she says. She wonders if Havers has made any effort at all. Has he sent detectives to interview Taylor Dent’s friends and associates? Has he tickled up his Cricklewood contacts – the kinds of guys Dent would have done business with? Has he fuck.

‘What about the family?’ she says. ‘What have they told you?’

‘There’s a younger brother, Fly Dent, about ten. He was sheltered from the worst of Taylor’s activities, it seems. Very much looked after by Taylor: he fed him, washed his clothes, got him to school on time, etcetera. Social workers are onto him now. Mother’s a total case. Cheap stuff, y’know: Magners, solvents, methadone. Boy’ll be taken into care, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Didn’t anyone report Taylor missing? Was there a misper investigation going?’

‘Brother came in, yes, on the Monday – think it was the twelfth.’ Havers straightens and leafs through some paperwork on his desk. ‘It was logged, of course. But a boy like him – if we launched an investigation into every missing young man who was into all sorts, DS Bradshaw … He wasn’t a minor, don’t forget. For all we knew, he was loading up a van with fags in Spain.’

Havers shrugs as if they have an understanding.
A boy like him
. He couldn’t care less about the death of a boy like Dent. She can imagine exactly what type of reception his little brother got when he tried to raise the alarm.

A bus flies towards her at such speed she thinks she’ll be hit, but it thunders past, its warm air whipping up her hair. The smell of fried eggs and the sound of brakes squealing like trapped pigs; past The Crown and Paddy Power and striped zip bags for the dispossessed outside the pound shop. Every face she passes, every snippet of language in the air, is from another part of the world. The shops are a motley cheek-by-jowl roll-call of immigration, like strata in a rock: McGovern’s Free House; Halal kebab;, Bacovia magazin românesc; Serhat Off Licence (Polski sklep); Bosnia & Herzegovina Community Biblioteka charity shop; Milad Persian food; D’Den Exotic African Cuisine; Taste of Lahore; Bestco mini mart, where half the shelves are empty. A rundown, slip-sliding melting pot, and the necessaries blooming like lichen: pawn shop, betting shop, funeral parlour, Western Union Money Transfer.

She keeps walking, and where the shops thin out and the traffic roars louder still is an Ethiopian restaurant, Abyssinia, with red and white cheesecloth curtains in the window, and beside it a grey metal door. 11A. Manon looks up and sees windows blacked by the pollution and grey nets, one pushed back by something – a sack or bag leaning against the glass. It’s going to smell in here, she thinks, as her body tenses against it, and she’s right, a combination of old frying (congealed fat, the type of smell you get from an unwashed grill pan) and damp. She’s been buzzed in and she tramps up the narrow stairwell with her polo-neck over her mouth and nose.

‘Yes, yes, come in, come in,’ says a woman in a strong Irish accent. She has a ginger fuzz of hair, which is dark grey at the roots, a pale, freckled complexion in among the thread veins, and frightened eyes. She is quick, like a creature burrowing to get away.

‘Mrs Dent,’ says Manon.

‘Dat’ll be me.’

‘My name is DS Bradshaw from Cambridgeshire Police. I’ve come to talk to you about Taylor Dent, your son.’

‘Taylor’s gone, de lord have mercy on his soul,’ she says, not looking Manon in the eye. Instead she leads the way in, leaving the door ajar. ‘Sorry about de mess …’

The smell recedes inside the flat, overtaken by stale cigarettes, which is not unpleasant, almost warming in a way. The light is dim, the carpets dark. The space opens out into a lounge, not much brighter, the nets blocking out the light from outside. The place seems embedded with human cells. A multitude, vibrating, of people long gone, arrested or dead.

Manon and Mrs Dent (‘Call me Maur
een
’) sit together on the sofa, brown floral chenille. There are open crisp packets on the floor. An overflowing ashtray. An enormous television takes up one half of the room.

‘I’ll clean dose up. I’ll get round to it. I’ve got to have a camera in me stomach. A camera down in me stomach, see. I don’t want it, so I don’t. I can show you de letter, you might understand it. I don’t understand it, see.’

She gets up again, beetling off in a stooped flurry. She hasn’t made eye contact and it’s as if she’s talking to the air, or to the flat, or to herself. Manon feels curiously invisible, not the first intruder from the state: Kilburn CID, social services, education welfare.

‘I don’t want it, no,’ Maureen says from somewhere in the hallway, and Manon follows her to a filthy galley kitchen with a full sink of dishes and every surface covered with bottles and cans (Magners, red wine, Fanta). Manon’s shoes stick to the linoleum. Maureen is pulling on recalcitrant drawers, stuffed with letters and lighters, which she then can’t shut. She is distracted by the discovery of a packet of John Player Blues, taking one out and lighting it, squinting at Manon for the first time.

‘Where were we?’ she says.

‘Taylor, your son.’

‘He’s dead. Taylor’s dead, Lord have mercy on ’im. I’ve had a letter from de doctor, it’s here somewhere.’ She has gone back to the drawers. ‘Dey want to put a camera in me stomach. Oh! I don’t want it. Can y’understand it?’

She has pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to Manon.

‘I don’t understand it,’ Maureen is saying, beetling back into the lounge.

Manon skim-reads, sees: ‘Appointment, twelfth of December 2010, 10 a.m. Gastroscopy, Royal Free Hospital.’

‘This appointment was three weeks ago,’ says Manon, following Maureen. ‘Did you go?’

‘Oh, tank God it’s over, den. Now who did ye say ye were?’

‘DS Bradshaw, Cambridgeshire Police. We found Taylor’s body.’

‘Oh no! Oh Jaysus, no, Taylor’s gone, rest his soul.’

Maureen is contemplating her cigarette. Manon can smell the booze on her, sweated out through her freckled skin.

‘Dat’s his room back dere,’ she says, pointing her cigarette towards the hall.

‘Can I have a look?’

‘If you like. You’re nat de first. Will I make ye a cup of tea?’

‘I’m all right, thanks,’ Manon says, thinking of the state of the kitchen.

She walks down the hallway, at the end of which are two open doorways side by side. Through one, she sees legs crossed at the ankles. A pair of thin plimsolls, once white, perhaps, the rubber gaping where it meets the canvas. No socks. Even indoors those feet must be freezing in a January like this one. Black skin, shaded blacker at the knuckle.

She puts her head around the door and sees the boy, sitting on the mattress on the floor, his legs outstretched. There’s a tiny television on the floor beside the mattress and he’s watching it. The mattress – not quite a double but bigger than a single – has two sleeping bags on it. There’s a melamine chest of drawers, all the drawers open, at the base of the mattress, so you’d have to crawl to get to it. The boy looks up. His hair is cut close to his head. His eyes, spectacularly dark, are enormous in his oval face. Manon is unable to speak for a moment. It’s not that he’s beautiful, so much (though he is); it’s that he is so intensely sad.

‘Hello,’ she says.

He looks back at the television.

‘What are you watching?’

‘
Dance
fucking
Download
. Piece a shit.’

They look at the screen a moment, with its tinny laughter.

‘My name’s Manon,’ she says. ‘Funny name, huh?’

He looks up at her. She realises he’s too old and too unhappy for games. He wants her to tell it straight.

‘I’m from the police. I’m trying to find out what happened to Taylor. Mind if I sit down?’

‘
Now
you wanna find out,’ he says.

She points at the bit of mattress next to him. He edges away to make room for her and she sinks down, sighing elaborately, the stiff-jointed grown-up. Her knees won’t quite bend so she sits like him, with her legs crossed at the ankle.

‘What’s your name?’ she asks, not because she doesn’t know, but because the boy deserves some formalities.

‘Fly,’ he says. ‘My name’s Fly.’

‘Nice to meet you, Fly Dent,’ she says, holding out her hand to him and smiling. ‘Manon Bradshaw.’ He takes it, his palm cold and dry in hers. She looks around her.

‘Did you share this room with Taylor?’

He nods.

She notices pirate stickers on the chest of drawers, silver and glittery and curling up at their edges. Skull and crossbones; cutlasses; a pirate ship. Children’s stickers, the kind they get free inside magazines. The sleeping bags behind her are entwined.

‘I’m very sorry, Fly. You must feel very sad,’ she says.

Fly looks at her. His eyes are frightened.

‘Did Taylor have a mobile phone?’

Fly nods. ‘Course.’

‘Do you know where it is?’

He shrugs. ‘He always had it – in his pocket. Same as dis one.’

He leans back to reach into his pocket and takes out a phone, rolling it in his hand.

‘Can I look?’ she asks, as Fly turns back to the television.

‘Taylor give it me,’ he says, keeping hold of the phone, ‘so I could call him. If I need him.’

He presses some buttons and shows her. The word Taylor is on the screen and she presses the green call button. The dead boy’s voice says, ‘I ain’t here, innit! Leave a message and I might call you back, or I might not …’ followed by shrieks of laughter.

‘Is that you laughing with him?’ she says, Fly’s phone to her ear, smiling as she listens because the laughing is infectious.

Fly nods, smiling too.

She hangs up. He has gone back to looking at the television, so she scrolls about the phone. The only number he has ever dialled is Taylor’s. Twenty or thirty times. Trying to find him. Perhaps he plays it as he goes to sleep, listening to his brother’s voice and the two of them laughing.

‘Are you hungry?’ she says.

He nods. ‘Taylor brought me KFC. He got the shopping from Bestco. Taylor feeded me.’

‘Come with me, then,’ Manon says, heaving herself up off the floor in an ungainly fashion.

She walks down the corridor to the lounge. ‘Mrs Dent? Maureen?’

Maureen is lolling on the sofa, watching
Cash in the Attic
. She seems only semi-conscious, a tin in her hand.

‘I’m just going to take Fly out for something to eat, OK?’

‘You’re all right lovey, yes,’ says Maureen, raising her can, her chin to her chest.

Christ, thinks Manon, I could be anyone.

Fly is big, nearly as tall as her, but still a child. Unmistakably a child, she thinks, as she watches him pull on a thin jacket – the type a tennis player would wear onto court, and about as useless as gauze against the January chill. She knows she shouldn’t be taking him out. Interviews with minors (well, it was hardly an interview, was it?) – there was a whole book of protocol, including never to interview them alone. No, she wasn’t interviewing him; she was buying him eggs. The boy needed eggs and this, like her taking home a police radio, was outside the bounds of protocol.

They are looking out on an optimistic arrangement of red plastic tables and chairs on the pavement, as if this were Ipanema, not Cricklewood Broadway. Beside them is a wire mesh shelving unit full of Portuguese or Brazilian biscuits and cooking ingredients, mostly starch-based, as far as she can make out (everything on the shelves is yellow). There is a vast flat-screen television bracketed close to the ceiling behind them, booming out a Portuguese game show. The café owner smiles broadly at them, saying, ‘Scrambled?’, with her pad poised.

‘Fried,’ says Fly.

‘Scrambled,’ says Manon, frowning at Fly. ‘And extra toast.’

A bus thunders past, slapped with an advert for Wonga. Following it is a plastic bag, bowling along in mid-air, its handles like beseeching arms until it hits a woman in a sari, square in the stomach.

‘Taylor used to go dere,’ says Fly, and Manon follows his gaze to a red awning on the opposite side of the road. Momtaz Shisha Café. ‘They all knew ’im in dere.’

‘Was he into anything stronger?’

‘You mean drugs?’ He shakes his head. ‘He saw Mum and her boyfriends, all dem losers. Said he’d never touch that shit. Said if I did, he’d kill me.’

In the pit of her stomach Manon feels a resolve hardening. She has to find out what happened to Taylor Dent, what took him from this boy he so evidently loved.

‘Tell me about the time leading up to Taylor going missing,’ she says. ‘When did you last see him?’

‘Sunday, it was. We got some shopping from Bestco. He was in a right good mood. We had beans on toast, watched
SpongeBob SquarePants
. He told me to do my homework, get my shit together for school next day. He was on his phone, texting.’

‘Who?’

Fly shrugs. ‘I din know who he knowed. I mean, he knowed a lot of people – din tell me ’bout them.’

‘And was this on his phone, the one you used to reach him?’

Fly shrugs again. ‘Sometimes he had more than one. Sometimes not. The phones changed, the ones for his … for bidniss.’ He looks down sheepishly as if he could still get Taylor into trouble with the police.