Stealing People (5 page)

5

18.30, 15 January 2014

Green Park tube station, London W1

A call. Boxer remembered he hadn’t spoken to the heating engineer who was installing a new radiator in his Belsize Park flat.

‘How’s it going?’

‘All done, Charlie. Now all you need is a decent boiler. The one you got in there would make them go quiet on the
Antiques Roadshow
. And by the way, who’s Charles Tate?’

‘Me.’

‘Not according to
my
invoice.’

‘Yeah, I know, too complicated to go into, but … it’s me. Why?’

‘I found a package addressed to Charles Tate under the floorboards when I was putting in the new pipework. Feels like a video cassette. I’ve left it on the kitchen counter.’

Boxer hung up. He had been about to go round to see Isabel, who’d just flown back from Mumbai after six weeks with her daughter, but now he had to investigate that package, couldn’t resist it. He called Isabel, who said she was still groggy with jet lag and would rather he left it until later.

Crammed into a rush hour tube, he stared into the coated backs of the passengers pressed against him. The time he’d spent as a boy and an adult searching that flat for a letter, a card, any tiny scrap of a note from his father. Something that would tell him, personally, why he’d had to go, to abscond, why he’d had to bloody leave him, his only child. It was the main reason he hadn’t sold the flat. Couldn’t bear the idea that he might have missed something.

He’d persisted in the belief that his father was a straight guy. He was an accountant, for God’s sake, trained at Price Waterhouse no less. Studied
PPE
at Oxford University. A judo champion. One of the four judokas the British team was going to send to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics until he’d torn his knee ligaments. A man who didn’t smoke, hardly drank, hadn’t even got any points on his driving licence. They didn’t come straighter than his dad, David Tate.

Then, as a homicide cop, Boxer had looked into his father’s cold case, the John Devereux file, which had been the only reason he’d become a detective. Devereux was the TV commercials director his mother, Esme, had produced for until he’d been found murdered in his Bibury home on 13 August 1979. The next day his father had absconded before the police could interview him. Boxer had been determined to prove his father’s innocence, but the investigation hadn’t been quite so straightforward and had been the main reason he’d left the police force to become a kidnap consultant. Sod history. History had never done him any favours.

And now here he was again. Hunting after history.

He got back to the flat in Belsize Park by seven o’clock. The package was addressed to him in his father’s handwriting.
CHARLES TATE
in big capitals. It was Esme who’d changed his surname to her maiden name when it was clear her husband wasn’t coming back. On the reverse side, again in his father’s hand, were the words:
To my only son, Charlie. Lots of love, Dad xxx
. He remembered the madly scribbled note that Esme had shown him nearly two years ago, when Amy had run away using the same words in her note that his father had written on the day of his disappearance:
You will never find me
. This time the writing was not as erratic as that note to Esme, but not as neat as other letters he’d inspected over the years.

Boxer had a sudden vision of his father sprinting up to the top of the house during those last, mad minutes before vanishing into oblivion, picking up a holdall, stuffing clothes into it as he went. But then he couldn’t quite picture him with the time or presence of mind to find a cassette tape, fit it into an envelope, write his son’s name on both sides, rip up the carpet, claw a hammer into the crack of a floorboard, wrench it up, throw the package into the cavity, hammer the pins back and kick the carpet over the grippers. No, this was done well before that awful day.

It touched Boxer to think of his father doing this for him. All those years living in hope that he would have secreted a note to him and yet it had never occurred to him to look under the floorboards. Why would he? Why would Mr Straight Tate leave a package under the floorboards? He realised now that this must have been planned and that there was some calculation involved. He wasn’t supposed to find it immediately. Maybe it was inappropriate for a seven-year-old’s eyes. It struck him, too, that this was supposed to be found only by happenstance or not at all. It was curious to feel his father’s mind at work. Perhaps not so different from his own as he thought of his safe with his poker winnings, the piles of cash in different denominations, the gun under the kitchen floor with the spare magazines and his secret numbers. As if he, too, knew that one day he might have to get out of his life with only moments to spare. Maybe we’re all like this, he thought, fingering the package.

He turned it over and over in his hands, imagining his father’s touch and care all over it. It was a buff envelope with a butterfly fastening, which had been taped over as well. The glue had aged and dried so the tape came away easily. He pinched open the butterfly and a video cassette slid out. Boxer recognised the old Betamax tape that had enjoyed brief popularity before the
VHS
format took over, because his mother’s production office had been full of them.

He had a surge of excitement that this was a video message and he was going to see his father talking directly to him. Tears came into his eyes. Something like eggshell cracked in his chest as he felt the emotion welling up from his stomach. On the other side of the cassette was a faded sticker from Dex-Box Productions and, in his father’s hand:
Found May 17th 1979
. Found? The date was three months before his father had absconded. Perhaps, thought Boxer with some delusory joy, this had nothing to do with Devereux’s murder and his father’s disappearance. It was just a communication with
lots of love, Dad xxx
. But then why ‘Found’? Why hide it? He shook the envelope and a folded piece of paper fell out.

Marcus Alleyne was sitting in his second-hand white Peugeot Bipper, which was still emblazoned with the daft cartoon logo of the cleaning company that had sold it to him. He thought it made him less obtrusive. He was parked next to some garages opposite a block of flats in East Walworth. The van was full of cigarettes he was going to deliver to a bigger supplier. He was nervous about the way the business had come to him. Although he’d worked with Harvey Cox before, it had been a while ago and he didn’t know his sidekick, but at least he’d been vouched for by Glider.

Then again, this was the first job he’d had from G in the last eighteen months. There’d been a breach of trust between Alleyne and the north London gangster. When Amy had gone missing a couple of years ago, Mercy remembered that Alleyne was the receiver of some cigarettes Amy had smuggled from the Canaries. It had been a bit of fun for Glider. Mercy had forced Alleyne to give her Glider’s address and had sent Boxer round to visit. Since then Glider hadn’t given Alleyne any work.

This business hadn’t come direct from G. When he checked back, Glider’s mobile number went through to some woman called Jess, said she was G’s new security boss and was acting on his instructions. She told him it was a regular bit of business, ten grand a month, with Harvey Cox and his sidekick Delroy Pink. Ten grand was too much for Alleyne to ignore and he wanted to get back in with Glider. But was it a set-up? Had the cops got to G? Fear slipped the leash and the thought that he might be part of a deal for a lighter sentence galloped through his mind. He saw himself from above sitting alone in a police cell waiting for his telephone call, the one that would drop Mercy to her knees.

‘Calm the fuck down,’ he muttered.

He was smoking a cigarette with a few strands of grass in it to take the edge off. He had the window open a crack to let the smoke out and the cold, damp air was blowing in. He turned on the engine, cranked up the heating. A white transit pulled up and a young black guy got out of the passenger side.

‘You Marcus?’ he asked.

Alleyne blanked him. That was not supposed to be the opening gambit. The young black guy leaned back, looked into the transit, shrugged. A rail thin black guy got out and came to Alleyne’s window walking in what seemed like exaggerated slow motion.

‘Sorry,’ he said, looking in with a bloodshot eye. ‘What he mean is: Glider sends his best regards.’

Alleyne shunted him back as he opened his door. The younger man shuffled to the front of the Bipper.

‘We going to do it here?’ asked the rail thin man, looking around at the dead end made up by garages on either side, a wall joining them.

‘You Pink?’ asked Alleyne, thinking what a ridiculous question to ask a black guy.

‘That’s me.’

‘Who’s driving?’ asked Alleyne.

Pink nodded the younger man to the driver’s side.

‘Who’s he?’

‘Jarrod.’

‘Move your van forward, Jarrod. I don’t want you parked up in front of me. Take it between the garages.’

‘How we going to do this?’ asked Pink. ‘You want him to
reverse
in there?’

‘You and I are going to start with the money, my friend,’ said Alleyne, looking at him warily.

‘Yeah, right. Ten grand is what we agreed.’

‘He reverses between the garages and you get in the passenger side of my van.’

The man nodded to the driver of the transit, wound his finger round and pointed to the garages.

Alleyne waited, sniffing the air, wondering if this was going a bit off or were they just being thick, these two?

The transit pulled away, turned and reversed up between the garages. Pink got in the passenger side of the Bipper. Alleyne eased himself behind the wheel. The man handed over a brown envelope packed with two blocks of fifty-pound notes. Alleyne counted through one and measured it against the other, put them in his inside pockets. He pulled out and reversed up alongside the white transit.

‘You take the two boxes out the back and I’ll get the other two out the side door,’ he said.

He slid the side door back, unloaded the two boxes and brought
them down to the back of the transit. When all four were loaded, he nodded to Pink and turned to shut the rear doors of the Bipper.

And that was when Jarrod appeared from behind his van, his arm swinging sideways.

A hard jolt to the back of his skull. Alleyne’s forehead thumped into the rear door of the Bipper. White sheet lightning flashed behind his eyes and he was falling into the black abyss.

‘I’m not really into that,’ said Amy.

‘You don’t sound very certain of yourself,’ said Siobhan, sipping her champagne, grinning her little gap-toothed grin.

She wasn’t. She’d never had a kiss like that before in her life. Even in the heat of the bar her nipples had gone hard and her breathing rapid. There was some kind of current fizzing in her coccyx and the treacliness in her stomach meant that she had to consciously resist the desire to run her hands over the black T-shirt straining over Siobhan’s breasts under her grey leather jacket.

‘Was it the tab you gave me?’ asked Amy.

‘I doubt it,’ said Siobhan. ‘That was just a placebo … mini aspirin. Maybe we should get some fresh air.’

She took Amy’s glass, put it on a table and walked her out of the bar with her arm around her waist. Amy tripped down the steps and staggered into the street. Siobhan caught her, cupped her breast. Amy felt the strength in Siobhan’s arm, the roundness of her bicep pressed into her side.

The cold air sharpened up Amy’s mind but she couldn’t help herself. She slipped her arm under Siobhan’s jacket, around her ribs and caressed her breast. She wanted another one of those electric eel kisses and pushed her face into Siobhan’s neck, felt its cords under her lips.

‘Let’s go somewhere and relax,’ said Siobhan, smiling.

They sat on a crowded overground train opposite each other. The distance in the aisle felt huge, but when the woman next to Siobhan left her seat, Siobhan put her finger up forbidding Amy to join her. They got off at Highbury and Islington and walked down Upper Street, hands clasped like lovers, as a homeless couple prepared themselves for the night in the doorway of a travel agent.
Siobhan pulled Amy off the main road and led her down dark, glistening streets of Georgian terraces.

They arrived at Lofting Road, to a house just down from a big old red brick Victorian school, and Siobhan let them into the warmth of a ground floor flat, where they fell on the sofa kissing madly. Siobhan kicked off her heels, pulled Amy up and pushed her into a dark bedroom at the back of the house, where she undressed her, sucked on her breasts and put her into bed. Amy heard the zip travelling the full length of Siobhan’s black leather skirt.

‘Turn the light on. I want to see,’ she said, massaging the saliva around her nipples.

‘It’s sexier in the dark.’

Amy spread her arms and legs out, felt the smooth texture of some expensive new white cotton sheets and duvet on her skin. She’d never been possessed by such powerful sexual anticipation in her life. The thought slid into her mind: maybe she was gay. Maybe this had been the problem: she’d just naturally assumed she was het without ever trying women. Certainly the boys she’d been with hadn’t triggered this kind of excitement. Was that really a mini aspirin Siobhan had given her?

There was a noise somewhere else in the house.

‘Come
on
,’ said Amy.

‘Did you hear that?’ asked Siobhan.

‘It’s just someone upstairs.’

‘The house is supposed to be empty. I was told I would be the only—’

A beat of silence before a tremendous crack. Feet rumbled into the living room and the bedroom door crashed open. The lights were slashed on. Amy sat up in bed, eyes slitted against the sudden glare. Men with tights over their heads, one with the loose leg hanging down his back like a long plait. Siobhan naked apart from her bra. But that wasn’t all … A penis was hanging from the pubic hair between her legs. Amy shook her head as if the ‘mini aspirin’ might be responsible for the hallucination. But no, it was definitely a long, slim penis between narrow hips above muscular thighs.