Then You Were Gone (24 page)

And do what then?????????
Jazzy should have known it would come to this; him stranded in a car park, clueless, asking Ayanna for advice on his next move. ‘She’s round here,’ he said to Simone, not taking his eyes off his phone as they both strode rapidly around the hinterland of the shops, past loading bays and rusty skips surrounded by fearless rats. As they cut across a scrubby verge to the access road where the bus stops were, he explained about Ayanna following Maria from the office. ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,’ he said. ‘I wish I had half her balls.’

When they got to the bus stop, to Jazzy’s relief Ayanna was still standing at the bus stop, behind a woman of late middle years with grey hair who was patently not Maria Novak, and a much younger woman with jet black hair and a shop-bought tan, who definitely was the woman whose photo they had seen on Gonagall and Partners’ website. He was about to greet Ayanna – quietly and discreetly, he was not a complete idiot – but she blanked him and looked back down at her phone. He nodded and leaned over to Simone, whispering, ‘It’s probably best if we pretend we don’t know Anna, isn’t it?’

Simone gave him a withering look. ‘Well, yes, Jazzy, I think it probably is.’

Maria Novak had her back to them so Jazzy had the liberty of observing her quite closely. The main thing that struck him was how young she looked. In her photo she had looked young, but he had assumed that must have been due to a combination of good make-up, soft lighting, professional Photoshop skills and the fact that she had the kind of round, girlish face that tended to shave half a decade off people’s assessment of someone’s age. In the flesh though, she still looked younger than Jazzy did; certainly too young to be about to become a grandmother. Her hair did not have that reddish sheen that indicated it had been dyed, and her plump cheeks showed no wrinkles. Maybe, he considered, Maria was not Jessica’s mother at all, but rather her sister.

The bus arrived and Maria got on and took a seat near the front. The older woman sat across the aisle from her, then Ayanna took a seat a few rows further back but on the same side as Maria. As Jazzy paid for his and Simone’s tickets and walked past Maria, he noticed that the woman looked incredibly tired. There were heavy bags under her pale eyes and she was staring off into the middle distance as though she was totally unaware of her surroundings. She did not even glance up as Simone and Jazzy walked past.

As the bus moved off Jazzy perched on the edge of the bench seat, his feet in the aisle. They needed to be able to leap off the minute they knew which was Maria’s stop. If they missed it and had to double back, they would doubtless have missed her and would be reduced to going back to the offices of Gonagall and Partners in an increasingly elaborate set of disguises. He remembered his earlier message to Ayanna, and privately acknowledged that he still had no idea what they would actually do if and when they did manage successfully to follow Maria Novak home, but he wanted to make sure they had the best possible chance of finding out.

He noticed with a little irritation that Simone was looking at her phone. He opened his mouth to explain to her that he would be getting off the bus at Maria’s stop with or without Simone and if she was too busy gormlessly reading the latest headlines then that was her lookout, but then he saw the bleak desolation in her face as she dropped the phone back in her bag, and he realised that there must still be no word from Mack.

The bus slowed down in traffic and Simone nudged him and pointed out the window. ‘That’s the place,’ she whispered to him, indicating a shabby red doorway in a row of pound shops and greengrocers.

‘What place?’

‘Where that kid got stabbed. From the newspapers.’

Jazzy knew she did not mean what people normally mean when they say ‘the newspapers’. She meant the actual newspapers that had been left on his kitchen table in the middle of the night by a stranger. Involuntarily he glanced at Maria Novak but she was still staring out of the front of the bus, her eyes clearly not seeing whatever was out there.

Simone had her phone out again. ‘I can’t remember his name,’ she said, a manic undertone in her whisper. ‘The kid that was killed there. What was his name?’

Jazzy realised with a guilty jolt that he could not remember either. This poor guy’s whole life had been reduced to ‘that kid that got stabbed’.

‘Got it,’ Simone whispered triumphantly, flashing her phone at Jazzy

‘Aaron Hodder,’ read Jazzy. ‘Wait, what’s that?’

‘What?’

‘There,’ he tapped the top of the online article. ‘It says
Breaking News
.’ He tapped again and a new article appeared, bearing that day’s date.

‘It says the trial’s been brought forward,’ Simone said. They looked at each other. ‘I wonder why.’

Jazzy had watched enough of Petra’s shitty crime dramas to have a fair idea why. ‘He must be changing his plea to guilty.’

Chapter Twenty-Four

When Jessica came out of the prison and got back in the car, Joe looked at her expectantly. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘How did it go?’

She shook her head, meaning to indicate that she needed a moment before she could trust herself to speak, but then she saw Joe’s face and remembered that she was not the only one who had had a lot riding on today’s meeting. Joe had said to her once, near the beginning of their time together, ‘I promised your mum I’ll look after you for as long as it takes.’ She thought of her hospital bag full of nappies and muslin squares and baby-grows in the back of the car and considered once again the possibility that her only companion through the baby’s birth might have been Joe. It surely must have seemed as horrifying to him as it did to her.

‘No,’ she said hurriedly as she saw his face fall. ‘It was good. It’s good news. He spoke to his solicitor yesterday. He’s changed his plea to guilty.’

Joe’s eyes and mouth widened into a gasp followed by a grin. ‘Wow! Really? Wow!’ He seemed almost overjoyed. He grabbed her arm and squeezed it; the first time, she realised, that he had ever touched her. ‘You’re going to be all right!’ he said jubilantly, then took a deep breath and paused. He seemed to be assessing the situation. ‘But – already? He already changed his plea before you’d even gone to see him?’

Jessica nodded. She had been unprepared for how much Connor had changed. After all, it was less than two months since she had seen him last, even though that time his entire face had been contorted with rage and horror and he had run away from her and everybody else before she had entirely realised that it was him.

Never a big guy, he now seemed tiny, everything about him somehow diminished. His hair was cut short all over, the shaggy brown mop gone and replaced with a buzz-cut. It made him look a lot younger, despite the fact that his once-round cheeks had hollowed out. He had lost a lot of weight; when she caught a glimpse of his wrist it looked barely thicker than her own.

‘He was upset,’ she said to Joe. ‘He understands now what he’s done – reckon he understood as soon as he did it.’ In fact it was an understatement to say that Connor had been upset. He had been barely coherent at times, and had broken down altogether when it was time for her to leave.

‘I’ve fucked it all up, Jess,’ he kept saying. ‘I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t mean to.’ Jessica nodded and tried to offer words of comfort. She had been there, she reminded him. She knew that in that moment he had meant to do it, but she had also been able to see that he was not himself. He had clearly been off his head on booze and drugs, screaming and raging a bunch of nonsense at poor, dying Aaron.

‘I can’t make it better,’ Connor had gone on, between sobs. ‘I can’t make him come back to life, can I? But I don’t want anyone else getting hurt, or having their life ruined by this. I was so glad when Savannah had told me you got in touch, because it meant I could at least say sorry to you. That’s why I wanted to see you. I wanted to be able to tell you I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Jess. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s OK,’ Jessica had reassured him, although really she did not know if it was OK. She felt bad for Connor, scared and alone facing years in prison, but she remembered the last gasps of the dying boy, thought of Marcus learning to walk again on the rehab ward, and knew who she felt sorrier for.

‘I told Liam not to do it,’ Connor said. Liam was his lunatic older brother, the person who she knew Connor had always looked up to and aspired to be like. He was nine years older than Connor and more like a father to him than their actual father. He was also a habitual criminal, a violent thug and a sadistic bully.

‘Do what?’ Jessica had asked, although she was pretty sure she knew.

‘Hurt your bloke – Mark, is it?’

‘Marcus,’ Jessica said, her throat dry.

‘Yeah, I told him not to. And that other lot he’s been putting the frighteners on, those lot that have been looking for you.’

‘OK.’ Jessica had not known anyone else was looking for her. The thought made her go cold. Maybe Mum had been right after all to send her away with Joe.

‘I told him not to, but you know what he’s like. But he knows now that there’s no point. I told him straight away yesterday, I’m going to plead guilty anyway, I’m going away for it anyway. She don’t even need to testify now, what she says makes no difference now. It’s me that did it, it’s me that’s to blame, not her.’

‘And did he listen?’

Connor shrugged. ‘Dunno. You know Liam. I think so. I think even he knows when something’s a lost cause.’

Joe drove them back to Mum’s house even more erratically than normal. The emotional impact of the news, coupled with the London traffic served to intensify his existing problems and Jessica was just glad when he eventually managed to get her home in one piece. They parked at the far end of her street and walked up to the cul-de-sac where her and Mum’s house was. As they approached the front door, she could see through the window that Mum was sitting round the kitchen table with three other people, none of whom she recognised. There was a tall, skinny black girl with long hair, a balding white bloke with a double chin and a woman of about thirty, pretty in a bohemian sort of way with dark, curly hair. ‘That’s weird,’ she said. ‘Mum’s got company.’

She turned to Joe, who was standing on the path, staring open-mouthed through the window. ‘Shit!’ he breathed. ‘What the hell are they doing here?’

Chapter Twenty-Five

All the times Simone had thought she caught sight of Mack, she now realised, she had known in her gut that it could not be him. This time though, even from the briefest glimpse through the window before she heard the door open, she knew it was him. The way he stood, the way his hair curled up from his forehead, the way he swung his left arm as he walked, the straightness of his back; none of those could belong to anyone else.

She, Jazzy and Ayanna had not been at Maria’s house for long, but they had been there for long enough to realise that the poor woman was terrified, confused and exhausted in equal measure. When she had answered the door, her arm had moved reflexively as though she wanted to slam it in their faces, but some instinct of politeness took over and she said, ‘Yes?’

Ayanna did all the talking. It was just easier to let her; she was the most confident of the three of them when all was said and done, and if they had not let her speak she would only have spent the whole time bobbing up and down on her toes, desperately trying to get a word in.

‘Maria?’ Ayanna had said.

The woman nodded.

‘We’re looking for someone called Joseph Mackinlay? Mack?’

Maria’s eyes widened momentarily, then she narrowed them, as though through a conscious force of will. ‘OK,’ she said slowly. She was obviously too tired to think up a lie on the spot and pretend she had never heard of him. That was what Simone would have done in her position, she thought, although that of course was dependent on her having all her wits about her, which it appeared Maria did not.

‘He’s a friend of ours,’ Ayanna went on, ‘and he’s been missing for a while. We found a birth certificate in his flat belonging to a girl called Jessica Novak.’ Simone waved the certificate in question from behind Ayanna’s shoulder. ‘Are you a relative of hers?’

‘Are you her sister?’ Jazzy put in, and Simone suppressed a wildly inappropriate giggle. Was this Jazzy’s idea of a chat-up line?

Maria closed her eyes for a second and sighed. When she opened them she said, ‘You’d better come in.’ As she ushered them in and closed the door behind them Simone saw her peer outside and take a long look up and down the street.

The four of them sat around Maria’s kitchen table in silence while she boiled the kettle. It was clearly a stalling tactic while the poor woman tried to get her head together, but Simone for one was glad of the opportunity to gather her own thoughts and of the prospect of a hot, caffeinated drink. Maria’s house was small but bright and tastefully decorated. As Simone looked around she realised that absolutely nothing in this ordinary little house was in fact ordinary. None of the furniture matched, but all of it was innately stylish, the bronze and orange tones of the kitchen flowing through into deeper reds and golds in the living room. The pictures on the walls were prints, but they were not of paintings that Simone, with her expert’s knowledge of art, had ever seen before. There were a couple of what looked like originals, slightly abstract-looking acrylic landscapes of canal paths, both clearly done by the same person. Simone wondered if Maria had painted them herself. She did not know how much a paralegal earned, but it was probably similar to the salary of a book restorer, and Simone knew for certain that she herself could not afford to decorate her house with original paintings. If Maria had painted them, then Simone was impressed. There was precision and technique in the work, but moreover there was a style, a wildness that spoke of an untamed inner life. There was a vase on the kitchen windowsill that Simone recognised as being made by an artisan potter she liked who often had a stall at Greenwich market. Simone felt that slight quickening of the pulse she got on the rare occasions when she felt as though she might be in the company of a kindred spirit. She opened her mouth to ask Maria about the vase, and that was when she caught the glimpse of Mack through the front window. He was with a young girl, visibly and heavily pregnant.