Surrogate – a psychological thriller (15 page)

We shook hands in the street, and I watched this funny bear-like man disappear into the crowd. I looked at my watch. It felt like the last good day of summer, so lovely that it caught the back of your throat. I was glad to be getting out of the city that afternoon. Eliska had sounded wary when I telephoned that morning and told her I was coming out to Berkshire to see Dad. Berkshire RE business, I said. I had not seen him for weeks. Our last meeting had been at our offices to discuss the terms of the American deal, and I had been shocked by how much he had aged. There were moments when I could see what he was going to look like as a very old man, and it upset me. What was it about the son wanting to kill his father and sleep with his mother? Or was it the father wanting to sleep with his daughter?

Ronnie took Mole and me out for dinner that night, and Mole flirted with him outrageously while he trotted out all the old stories. I sat back and listened and wished I had known him when he was at his peak. He must have been one hell of a salesman.

Watching the countryside slide by the train window, I thought about Alice again. Fear began to gnaw my insides. What if she told Mole what had happened out of spite, as a way of punishing me? She had already threatened to tell her about our affair. Of course, I would deny everything. Our affair. Jesus, that was dignifying a one-night stand way beyond what it was. Another train slammed past the window, startling me, and I saw myself in the black mirror as the train sped past, a guy in his mid-thirties who looked as if he'd partied too hard.

The taxi took me from Twyford station down the familiar country lanes of my childhood. Everything looked smaller than I remembered, and I turned to watch a teenage boy pushing on his bike towards Sherlock Row. I had been that boy once. Summer days cycling from village to village under piercingly blue skies. Always on my own. I did not have any friends in the area, and I was unpopular at school. Other boys used to sneer when Dad parked his Rolls-Royce in the school drive. An overweight boy with an unhappy home life. Somehow my accent was not quite right, and my clothes never fitted properly.

Eliska met me at the front door again and accompanied me through the house, gliding upstairs. Today was not a good day, she said. Ronnie had had a bad night, she whispered as she knocked softly and showed me in.

My father was lying in bed hooked up to the dialysis machine. His skin had turned yellow, as if he was being poisoned from the inside. Perhaps Mum was right: all that bile really was killing him.

"Sometimes I wish I was dead," he coughed. "Not that I would give the cunts the satisfaction."

Sometimes I wish you were too
, I thought. Instead I said, "What was it you used to say, 'If you wait on the riverbank long enough, you'll see the bodies of your enemies float past'? You wouldn't want to miss out on that, would you?"

He grinned, flashing his yellow teeth. "I'm thirsty. Get me a glass of water."

I refilled his water glass from the tap in his en-suite bathroom and caught sight of myself in the mirror again. I didn't look great either. Bad dreams were taking their toll; if only I could get a good night's sleep. Idly, I opened the bathroom cabinet door and saw Dad's prescriptions. I picked up one brown bottle and read the dosage for Temazepam. Sleeping pills. Quickly I shook out a couple and wadded them up in toilet paper, saving them for later.

"Thank you," said Dad, after having drunk the water. "Sibley says you still haven't signed off the accounts."

"That's what I thought we were going to talk about." Even with my father bedridden and hooked up to a dialysis machine, I was still frightened of the old monster. I decided to plunge straight in. "There's a hole in the figures. Brian says you've been taking money out of the company for years. He says it's all legal for tax planning. It's just the amount that bothers me. We're talking millions over the years. The thing is, Dad, you've got to pay it back. The board never agreed to this."

Dad watched me, his head weaving a little like a cobra about to strike. I thought about the story the man in the sauna had told me about the rat. Except that now I was the cat and he was the mongoose.

"The board never agreed to this," he repeated in a childish, sing-song voice. "What are you, eight? This is my company. I created it."

"Yes, but you can't just treat it as your personal piggy bank."

"Your flat. Your flashy car. Your monthly salary. Do you think you deserve to get paid what you do?" he asked.

"Yes, I think so. I'm the chief executive of an underwriting syndicate. So, yes, I do think I'm paid what I deserve."

Dad moistened his upper lip with his tongue. Beep beep. Beep beep. "I could throw a stick onto the trading floor and hit twenty of you. Nobody's irreplaceable."

I was not going to let him bully me like this. I wondered about my memory of school on the way up here. Bullies, every one of them. "The point is that you've been treating the company like your personal bank account. Millions have gone. We could have paid out on some of those claims. A lot of people went to the wall, Dad, you know that. Brian has begging letters pleading for more time. People lost their homes, everything."

"They knew what they were getting into. Liability was capped at a million pounds."

"Yes, but our salesmen went to them, they didn't come to us. We told them it was risk free. You could have helped. Instead you did nothing."

"While you're on your high horse, just remember that you're in this too. You're the chief executive; you're meant to know what's going on. So either you were negligent or incompetent."

He started coughing, and I stood there almost gripping the floor with my toes, determined to hang on. "If you don't repay the money, I w-w-will go to the Lloyd's Committee and tell them what's been going on."

There. I had played my ace.

"You'll w-w-w-do not such thing," Dad said, mimicking my stammer. "What are you going to tell them? 'I didn't know what was going on'? 'Nobody told me'? 'I was just the patsy?' You've seen the accounts. Listen, the Americans won't buy this company until the accounts are kosher. Once they do that, it's going to be like a money orgasm. For you and me both."

"And what if I don't?"

"Then you can wave goodbye to all this. You'll lose your fancy apartment and the Porsche, too. Then you really will have nothing. You've already lost your baby; you don't want to lose your wife as well." He started coughing again.

"Are you threatening me?"

"I don't threaten. I promise."

We both stood there for a moment listening to the beep of the dialysis machine.

"Listen, son," Dad said, "I don't want to piss on your chips."

"If I sign, you must repay the money." My mouth had gone completely dry. I had never challenged him before, and it made me nauseous to do so.

Dad sighed. "I'll repay some of the money, and you can give it to the hardship committee. They'll repay the Names who got burnt the most. There. Does that satisfy you?"

"You'll give me your word?" Dad had always gone on about the importance of a man's word. Except when it suited him better not to.

Dad nodded and shifted in bed. "Now that we've got that out of the way, what's been happening with this girl? Have you found her yet?"

"I've hired a private detective to see if he can trace her. He thinks he's got a pretty good chance."

"I'm sorry about what I said about your baby. Emily's a lovely girl. You shouldn't have to go through something like this. Can't the police do anything?"

"You would have thought that in this age of mobile phones, people don't just disappear."

Dad started coughing, and this time I helped him sit back up. "She'll be in touch," he said, recovering. "She'll need money. One thing I know, money is like the sixth sense. Without it you can't enjoy the other five."

Mole had circled March 22nd as Alice’s due date in the kitchen calendar. It was a daily reminder of what we had lost, as if somebody had stolen a limb. You would reach around, knowing something was not there, and only then remember what it was.

Martin Wynn was wrong.

There were no quick answers, no sudden breakthrough in our search for Alice Adams. Instead, Wynn explained, there was a patient combing of mobile phone records, Facebook posts and tweets; anything that might provide a clue. I pictured vast interlocking databases grinding away, all searching for our missing surrogate.

Days lengthened to weeks that turned into months.

Wynn admitted that he wasn't getting anywhere and suggested he drop down to a couple of days a week, and finally just the one. You could hear the exasperation in his voice. He had come up against a complete dead end, he admitted, something that had never happened to him before. It was uncanny. The only explanation was that somebody was helping to hide her, a relative or a boyfriend, perhaps. People do not just disappear like that, he said.

Slowly I came to believe that Mole and I had started to forget about Alice. It was like a bad dream that we were moving away from; soon there were whole days when I did not even think about her. I even managed to forget that we had slept together just that once, which was why this whole nightmare had happened. A crust had formed over the wound, and finally we were healing.

Then we reached the day when our baby was due to be born. Alice had run away exactly six months ago previously. I remember sitting in my office reading a report when my phone rang.

"Hugo Cox." I was still scanning the report, on underwriters' reactions to a prototype helicopter. Other insurers' assessments of this proposed replacement for the troubled Sea King helicopter were mostly negative.

"Hello, Mr Cox. Martin Wynn."

"Hello, Martin. So, how have you been getting on? Any news?" My mind was still composing my own slightly more favourable response. A Polish consortium was building this helicopter, for ferrying oil workers out to the rigs. It had to be as reliable as a bus service.

"Yes, I do have some news. I've found out what Alice's real name is and where she went to school." I felt my scalp crawl. This was our first breakthrough in months. "And there's also something else you need to know." Pause.

"Go on, you can't leave me hanging like this." I laughed nervously.

"I would rather we met face to face. It's delicate, you see. Something you might not like."

"When can I see you? Do you want me to come to your office?"

"That would be good. Do you still have my card, or do you want me to give you my address again?"

"Give it to me again to be safe."

I scribbled down Wynn's address on a Post-It note, and we arranged to meet at five o'clock. I reckoned his Oxford Street office would take me twenty minutes to reach on the Central line.

Replacing the phone in the cradle, I was too excited to carry on with emails. I had to share the good news with Mole.

"Darling, it's me," I said when she answered. "Martin Wynn's just called. He's found out Alice's real name and where she went to school. It's the first breakthrough we've had in months."

"Oh my God, I can't believe it. So what is it then, what's her real name?"

"He wouldn't tell me over the phone; he says he needs to see me in person. It's delicate, he says."

"Oh darling, that's such good news. If we know who she really is, then we can find where she's living, right?" Pause. "Do you think she's had our baby already? Today's the due day."

"I honestly don't know," I said. "Listen, I've got to run. I've got to go into a meeting. I'll phone you later when I've seen him."

The meeting dragged on interminably. I kept looking at the wall clock, its second hand ratcheting away while we pored over the figures.

Emerging from Tottenham Court Road Tube and turning left, I immediately sensed something was wrong. There was some kind of commotion up ahead. Strobing blue lights. I realised they were from fire engines and that the street had been blocked off. Oily black smoke was roiling upwards into the dusk from the top floor of a shop, while the pavement was jammed with people, some of them filming on mobile phones. Cursing my luck, I wondered whether to call Wynn, whose office, I guessed, was smack in the middle of the cordoned-off block. "They're not letting anybody through," grumbled a man to my right. Ignoring him, I caught an officer's attention. "Excuse me. Can you tell me what's going on?" I asked. The constable ambled over from the other side of the flapping tape. There had been a fire in an upstairs office, he said. "But I have business here," I replied. The policeman asked me which number and I told him. He checked his clipboard and then asked which business I was visiting. "Global Investigations," I said, remembering the faintly ridiculous-looking world logo on the card Wynn had given me, which was, after all, only a one-man band being run out of a serviced office. The PC went off to consult his superior. "They're saying it's arson," the old woman said next to me. The PC walked back and lifted the twisting red-and-white tape. "You'd better come through," he said.

The pavement was slick with water, and fire hoses snaked into the building entrance. Fire crews stood around in overalls and visors while walkie-talkies squawked, and there was a sense that everything was over already. The PC was talking a woman in a raincoat with her back to me, who I immediately recognised as the Indian detective we had met in the police station. When she turned around, I think we were both as surprised as each other.

Detective Inspector Syal, however, did not look terribly pleased to see me. "My officer says you know the man whose office was firebombed."

"I'm sorry?"

"The man you came to see. Somebody poured petrol through his letterbox. He was locked inside so we had to break the door down."

"My God, is he all right?"

"Can you identify him? You obviously know who he is."

"His name's Martin Wynn," I said. I felt myself going into shock. "He's a private detective. I was coming to see him about some work he was doing for me."

We wouldn't even have been having this conversation if you hadn't recommended we hire somebody, I thought. The irony was not lost on me.

"Coming through," said a voice behind us. I turned to see green-suited paramedics stretchering somebody out covered in a red blanket. Wynn's face looked as if it had been boiled away.

We watched the ambulance doors open, and a paramedic inside helped ease the stretcher in.

Syal turned to me. "I would be grateful if you could accompany him to the hospital. You're the only one who knows him." Wynn was moaning and crying from the back of the ambulance. "Wait until the local wears off," Syal said quietly.

"He must have a wife and family. Can't you contact them?"

"We're trying to do that," the detective said, touching my elbow. Clearly, she was giving me no choice. The paramedic was shutting the doors when Syal told him to wait. "I'm a friend," I explained, clambering up.

Wynn was lying on a gurney hooked up to a saline drip. I wondered whether he could still tell me what he had discovered about Alice. The paramedic gestured to a jump seat and we set off, saline bag jangling as we tore through the West End. I guess they were taking us to St Thomas', south of the river. I tried following the route in my mind as we turned left, then right, but soon gave up. The paramedic was making notes on a clipboard. He smiled encouragingly at me, as if to say everything was going to be all right.

I was thinking about phoning Mole and telling her what had happened when we stopped. The paramedic checked Wynn's vital signs and told me to wait while he went for help. Opening the back door, he jumped down into what I glimpsed to be an underground car park. There was a smell of cement and petrol. "Won't be a sec," he said, slamming the door. I sat back down and stared at my clasped hands, trying not to look at the private detective. It was as if somebody had thrown a glass of acid over him. Wynn was sobbing. I willed myself to get up and stand over him. I felt helpless because he was in so much pain. "Help me," he whispered. Where was that paramedic? Why was he taking so long? "It's going to be okay," I said uselessly.

Suddenly Wynn went into convulsions, his legs hammering beneath the blanket.

It was such a shock, I jumped backward. Wynn's chest lunged upward as he made an awful sucking sound, as if he could not get enough air inside him. The ECG flatlined, and the alarm sounded. I am ashamed to say that I panicked as I tried to get the ambulance door open. I pulled the handle down, but still it wouldn't budge. I was locked in. "Help," I shouted, banging on the window. Ambulance men were standing around the entrance talking. Why couldn't they hear me? I wrenched at the handle but still it would not move. "Help," I yelled, thumping on the glass.

Martin Wynn died while the paramedics were clattering his gurney into A&E.

The A&E nurse left me sitting alone in the hospital atrium absorbing what had just happened. A stunned-looking old woman with a tube up her nose was being wheeled past me towards the hospital entrance. Our private detective had burned to death in an office fire. Now he would never be able to tell me Alice's real name. I felt as if I had come
this
close (I pinched my thumb and index finger together) to solving our mystery, only to see the truth wriggle away from me.

I tried ringing Mole, but the call went straight to voicemail, so I left a message telling her to call me back. Urgently. Then I took a sip of thin hospital coffee. I was starting to feel bad now the adrenaline was wearing off. I could have been burnt alive, too. What if I had arrived on time and both of us had been trapped, shouting for help as flames ripped through his office? I had come this close to death.

That was when I saw them. A woman and her teenage son coming in through the revolving door. A doctor was there to meet them and I knew, I just
knew
this was Martin's wife and child. Everybody came here to lose something, I reflected, a limb or a relative or, in this case, a husband and father. The woman opened her mouth, and after a moment made an awful keening noise while her son just looked at the ground.

DI Syal came up to me, and I was glad of the distraction. I did not want to watch the grieving family anymore.

"It was you who gave me the idea of going to see him," I said, looking up.

"I don't understand. What do you mean?"

"The private detective. You told me to hire one. We still haven't found her, you know. Our surrogate. Six months now, and not a word. It's like she's vanished into thin air. Wynn phoned to tell me that he'd found her real name. That's what I was going to see him about."

"We're treating it as murder. Do you have any idea who might have done this?"

"He mostly did divorce work. A husband he'd caught out taking revenge? I dunno – it could have been anybody."

"I am afraid I need to treat you as what we call a 'significant witness'. Would you be all right to come to the station with me now? We need you to give a statement."

"What, now? Can't it wait until the morning?"

Syal shook her head, and, an hour later, I found myself back in the interview room with the big tape recorder and the bolted-down table and chairs. I went through the whole sequence of events, from our surrogate walking out on us with our baby to Wynn telling me he had found out who she really was. "And apart from your wife, was there anybody else who knew you were meeting the deceased?" Syal asked. Anybody could have known I was meeting Wynn, I told her. My assistant knew how to get hold of me.

Syal told me that I was free to go, but that I should make myself available in case she needed to contact me again. They would be in touch, she said.

Blue lights splintered and reflected back at us through shop windows as we sped through the City. It took about half an hour for the police to drop me back at Woolwich Arsenal.

Mole came out to meet me in the hall as I put down my briefcase. You could see how worried she was. We hugged and held each other for the longest time. Why is it that the touch of another human being, the feel of their skin, is the nearest thing we can know to paradise?

"It was horrible, Mole. His body was covered with burns. He asked me to help him. The paramedic left us alone in the ambulance for a moment, and that's when it happened. He had a massive heart attack right in front of me. I've never seen anybody die before."

"Here, come into the kitchen and have a drink. Who would do such a thing?"

"That's what the police asked. I know that Wynn did a lot of matrimonial work. Perhaps it was a pissed-off husband. I don't think I'm ever going to forget his face, Mole. It was dreadful." I paused for a moment, remembering just how awful it was, and shuddered. "Funnily enough, the officer investigating the case was that woman we met, the Indian one."

"Who, the woman detective inspector?"

I nodded as Mole led me into the kitchen, where I unloaded my pockets, dumping my BlackBerry and keys on the counter. We kept a bottle of gin on the sideboard, and I poured myself two fingers while Mole banged the freezer open hunting for ice cubes. The mood I was in, the blissful anaesthetic barely made any difference to how I was feeling. I guess I was still in shock. I had come this close to death, and it had really shaken me. Taking in my surroundings for the first time, I looked round the kitchen: there was a pot of delicious-smelling casserole on the stove and half-diced vegetables on a chopping board. Glancing at the wall calendar, I reflected bitterly that today was our baby's due date, the day that was supposed to be the happiest of our lives. Instead, I had witnessed somebody's death. Mole bustled about. She was a great believer that food and drink were the salve for all wounds, even a psychic wound as deep as this one.

"Somebody must have seen something," Mole said. "It was a serviced office block. You can't just walk in off the street and start pouring petrol through somebody's letterbox." I nodded. "I could have died," I repeated, shaking my head. Mole sat down and took my hand. She looked concerned.