Running Girl (2 page)

‘What's the plan?' Garvie said.

There was a general shrug.

Smudge suggested going down the pub. ‘Or what about that new place in town does those vodka jellies? Rat Cellar, innit?' Felix knew the bouncer there, but not in a good way. Dani mentioned the casino, Imperium. But they'd have to collect a few fake members' cards and get togged up, and the whole thing seemed like too much of an effort. Anyway, none of them had any money. In the end they sat there in silence.

‘All right,' Garvie said. ‘What've you got?'

They pooled tobacco and papers. Tiger had a half-bottle of Glen's vodka, two-thirds empty, Dani had a couple of cans of Red Stripe lager and Smudge had a bag of sherbet lemons. They passed everything around. Felix had been to see Alex earlier and he rolled a medium-sized spliff and sent that round too.

They had some jokes. Tiger and Dani played chicken with an old sheath knife Tiger had found at the back of Jamal's, and Smudge fell off his swing and gave himself a nosebleed. Garvie sat apart, gazing in silence over the nearby rooftops towards the distant lights of the tower blocks downtown, blurry in the murky phosphorescence that lay above the city. He'd grown up here, had known it all his life, and knew beyond all reasonable doubt that it was an utter bore. Town was a bore, with its shops and stores, City Hall and pedestrian precincts. The old quarter of cafés and restaurants was a bore. The new business district was a bore. The malls and superstores that sprawled along the ring road were bores. And the Five Mile estate was the biggest bore of all. Sighing, he began to roll a spliff.

‘Hey, Sherlock,' Smudge said. ‘Got a mystery for you. Off one of them puzzle sites.'

Garvie looked across to where Smudge sat grinning. Nature had not been kind to Smudge. He had the face of a middle-aged butcher and the expressions of a ten-year-old child. He sat squashed into a seat on the roundabout, his pale, round face glistening with rain-wet, his little mud-coloured eyes gazing at Garvie eagerly. Garvie shook his head. He took out cigarette papers, tobacco and a largish amount of hash wrapped in foil, and began to stick two papers together.

‘Busy,' he said at last.

‘It's a good one. Serious.'

‘What's the point, Smudge? The motive's always the same.'

‘Like what?'

‘Sex or money.'

‘Two things I don't have a problem with, personally. Come on. Bet you a big one you can't solve it.'

The boy rubbed the bristles of his big cropped head with sudden concentration, sighed with satisfaction, and resumed grinning. Garvie ignored him. He sprinkled tobacco onto the paper and crumbled in the hash and licked the edges of the papers.

Smudge began anyway.

‘On the first of June, Lola Soul Diva's found face down on the floor of her luxury apartment. She's been stabbed from behind.' He paused and thought for a moment. ‘Right in the spleen,' he said with satisfaction.

Garvie rolled, pinching at the sides.

Smudge went on. ‘There's no sign of a struggle except the index finger of her left hand, busted where she fell forward. No bruising anywhere else, clothes not ripped, glasses still on her nose not smashed, watch still on her wrist – her
right
wrist – not smashed.'

He grinned slyly. ‘Good, innit?'

‘No,' Garvie said with a sigh. ‘It's crap. Like life itself, my friend.' With his teeth he twisted loose tobacco off the ends of the monster spliff, examined it for a moment and casually tossed it up into the corner of his mouth.

Smudge went on: ‘In her right hand she's holding a pen. Lying next to her is her private diary. On the page for that day she'd written
Told Big Up I don't love him no more
. At the top of the page, next to the date, she's written in this shaky writing
6ZB.
Got it?
6ZB.
Next to her diary is a ripped-up photograph of her husband.'

He grinned again. ‘Good, innit?'

‘No,' Garvie said. ‘It's a bore. Sex or money. Sex
and
money.' He flicked a match alight with his thumbnail and ignited the spliff.

Smudge continued doggedly. ‘Three men admit to visiting her that day. Her husband, who's this pro poker player with a coke habit and a bad limp, called Dandy Randy Wilder. Her manager, Jude Fitch Abercrombie, a coke head with his left arm in a sling. And her boyfriend, this half-blind coke addict called Big Up Mother. All of them give the police good explanations for their visits.'

He wiggled his eyebrows. ‘It's brilliant, this, innit?'

‘Utter twaddle,' Garvie said, taking a long drag on the spliff and turning his eyes upwards.

‘All right then, Sherlock. Work it out. Who did it?'

Garvie exhaled and passed the spliff to Felix, who looked at it with something like awe. ‘No one did it,' he said.

‘Come on, champ, you can do better than that.'

Garvie sat silently in a cloud of smoke gazing across the darkened field beyond the playground.

‘You got to think of what she wrote,' Smudge said. ‘Especially' – he paused dramatically – ‘
6ZB
.'

‘Nonsense.'

‘And while you're at it,' Smudge went on, ‘give some thought to that undamaged watch. On her
right
wrist.'

The spliff went round and came back to Garvie, and he took a long drag, and then another.

‘You know,' Smudge said, ‘I'm actually gutted. Thought you were good at this sort of thing. You smoke too much of that stuff, probably. Softens the brain. Do you want me to tell you what happened?'

‘I know what happened.'

‘Tell us, then.'

‘No one did it.'

Smudge tutted. ‘All right. If you can't guess I'll have to tell you. Her manager did it.'

Garvie blew out smoke. ‘No, he didn't.'

‘Did, actually, Sherlock. Shall I tell you how I know?'

Sitting there in his cloud of smoke, Garvie said in a bored voice, ‘She's wearing a watch on her right wrist, so she's probably left-handed. But she wrote
6ZB
with her right hand because of her broken finger so her writing was shaky. So it's not
6ZB
at all. It's 628. And if you match those numbers to the months of the year in her diary – June, February, August – and look at the initial letters, you get JFA: Jude Fitch Abercrombie. Her manager.'

‘Oh.' Smudge looked puzzled. ‘There you are, then. The manager did it.'

‘The manager didn't do it because the murderer stabbed her from behind through the spleen.'

‘So?'

‘The spleen's on the left, Smudge. Only a left-handed person would do that. And the manager had his left arm in a sling.'

Smudge opened his mouth and shut it again, and his whole face sagged a little. ‘Shit,' he said at last. ‘I must have told it wrong.'

Garvie leaned over and patted him on the arm. ‘Don't worry about it, Smudgy. Life's like that.'

They sat on the roundabout, knees tucked up to their chests, hoods pulled over the heads. The spliff went round three times more, shrinking to a speck of fire and vanishing at last after stinging everyone's lips. The vodka had gone a long time earlier. They finished the Red Stripe, and Smudge ate the last of the sherbet lemons, and they even ran out of cigarettes. The rain came on again, gently at first, and at last the conversation died. In the wet of the darkness they sat there listening to the noises of rain and the occasional passing car.

‘Oh God,' Garvie said. ‘If something doesn't happen soon I think I'm going to lose control.'

Smudge looked interested. ‘What do you mean by “soon”?'

‘Now, or in the next few minutes.'

And at that moment a siren went off next to them, so brutal and sudden it threw them into the air like rag dolls. Mouths open, hearts pounding, they just had time to see two police cars scream to a halt at the park gates – lights buzzing, doors flying open, policemen leaping into the road – before scattering randomly across the muddy grass towards the darkness.

THE POLICE WERE
also at ‘Honeymead', one of the new houses on Fox Walk, down off Bulwarks Lane, a quarter of a mile away. At the end of the cul-de-sac a squad car was parked across the road, doors open, light still flashing, no one in it. Everything was quiet. There was a hush, as if all the neighbours watching from behind their curtains were holding their breath. From inside the house a woman suddenly cried out once, high and shrill. Then there was silence again.

In the little conservatory at the back of the house, Inspector Singh of the City Squad looked out of the window into the darkened garden as he waited for Mr Dow to calm his wife, who had collapsed onto the settee. It was a small garden, like those of all the houses in the cul-de-sac; tidy too, with a narrow strip of patio, a neat square of lawn and three sides of flowerbeds packed with shrubs. An ornamental bird bath gave it a touch of light fantasy. The house was the same, he'd noticed: very small, very neat, with unexpected fancy details here and there, like the elaborate door chimes and bamboo-cane furniture.

Inspector Singh was a man who noticed things. He had a silent face and still, watchful eyes. The reticence of his features – narrow mouth, refined nose, regular jaw – might have made him seem anonymous, but his machine-like alertness was conspicuous to everyone he met. Conspicuous too was his uniform – not a requirement for inspectors but something he personally insisted on.

He turned back to Mr and Mrs Dow, who sat together, quietly now, on the bamboo-cane settee. Mrs Dow gave him an angry look, her face wet and twisted. Singh had seen the expression before on the faces of other mothers. She was frightened, and under her fear was resentment and shame. He glanced across at the constable, Jones, who was staring at his boots.

‘Mrs Dow,' he said carefully. ‘By far the likeliest scenario is that your daughter's perfectly safe. For reasons of her own she may have decided to go somewhere and she'll contact you when she wants to.'

Even as he said it he didn't believe it. Mr Dow looked at him with disgust. ‘Until then,' Singh went on in the same careful way, ‘we'll do all we can to try and locate her. We're checking the hospitals. An alert's gone out to the community officers. In the meantime it would be helpful to know a little more about what happened.'

Mr and Mrs Dow each gave a small, reluctant nod.

He said, ‘Let's start with the basic facts.'

There weren't many. Chloe Dow, aged fifteen, had gone jogging and hadn't come back.

‘What time did she leave the house?'

About seven o'clock, they thought. Neither Mr nor Mrs Dow had actually seen her go. She'd left a note on the living-room table, which they found when they came in from late-night shopping:
Gone for a run. Back 7.30.
Usually she ran for about half an hour.

Singh made careful notes in his book. ‘And where did she go? Do you know?'

Mrs Dow shook her head. It could have been any one of her usual routes. Down Pollard Way and back through East Field. Along the bypass to the roundabout and back. Up Old Ditch Road, out beyond the ring road on the track that goes through Froggett Woods to Battery Hill. Or somewhere else. She'd left no clue. Just:
Gone for a run
.

‘And when she didn't return, what did you do?' he asked.

The Dows looked at each other. Nothing, at first. They were angry with her. There had been arguments recently. They plated her tea and put it in the fridge and tried to watch television. Around nine o'clock they couldn't stand it any more and began to phone round Chloe's friends, asking if they'd seen her. After that, Mr Dow went out in his van and drove along Chloe's usual jogging routes looking for her while Mrs Dow stood at the kitchen window staring at nothing. When he got home she phoned the police.

‘And here you are,' she said bitterly.

Singh paused. He said, very carefully, ‘Is there any reason you know of why she might have decided not to come home this evening?'

Mrs Dow made an angry snorting noise. ‘Why do you keep saying that? She hasn't run away!' Her lip trembled and her face began to crumple. ‘Something's happened to her,' she shouted through her sobs.

Standing again at the conservatory window, Singh checked his phone. The station had forwarded a couple of texts from community officers. A late-night jogger had been stopped on Pollard Way. Some kids smoking weed in Old Ditch Road playground had been questioned. He deleted the messages and checked his watch: 11.30 p.m. Lost in thought, he stared out into the dark and rainy garden. At this time of night, as the weather worsened, there was little chance of a community officer spotting anything. Besides, he already had a bad feeling about Chloe Dow. As Mr and Mrs Dow knew, girls who go jogging don't usually decide to run away from home at the same time.

As he stood there thinking, something in the garden distracted him, and he screwed up his eyes and peered out through the wet window. But it was nothing; only shadows of the shrubs stirring under the rain. Then a call came through from the duty officer asking for an update, and Singh turned and walked back through the conservatory, talking. He hadn't got as far as the dining room when there was a loud crash behind him from outside.

Spinning round, he looked back through the conservatory window and caught a glimpse of fencing buckling in the shadows of the shrubbery and the sudden outline of someone leaping.

‘What the ...!'

Mr Dow was on his feet, staring. Jones was already running towards the front door, like a dog suddenly let off the leash.

Singh put his hand on Mr Dow's arm. ‘What's behind the garden?'

The man pointed. ‘Roadworks depot that way. And the Marsh Fields over there.'

Singh called after Jones, already out of the door, ‘Take the depot!' Then he was running too.

He ran into the rain and slithered across the illuminated grass at the side of the house, glimpsing the rainy outline of Jones, ahead of him, already climbing the fence.