To Catch a Rabbit (23 page)

‘Maybe it’s just me, Sean, but that feels more brotherly.’

‘Burger’s her brother? Bloody hell! What happens now?’

‘Fuck knows. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Or maybe not!’ Carly laughed but the sound was lost in the music.

They were both drunk and way out of their depth. Sean had been out of his depth for a long time, ever since those grubby kids met him on the glass-encrusted pavement of the Chasebridge Estate. Shit, he thought, there’s no going back.

Later, much later, he sat on the edge of the pavement and spewed up everything he’d eaten and drunk over the previous six hours. He wished he felt better but he just felt worse. He started to cry. Rick crouched next to him and rubbed his shoulders.

‘Come on, mate, it’s not worth crying over spilt beer.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Sean slurred.

‘I don’t know. It depends if you’re crying over the case or the girl.’

Sean rocked back and forth trying to stop the flow of tears. ‘Fucking both. No, the case, yes, it’s the fucking case, she’s taken everything I’ve worked on and claimed it as hers, and the bastard, Guy-the-bastard, he’s with her now. Well he can have her. I’m not going to help her now. I still know stuff I haven’t told her, she’ll have to work it out for herself, she thinks she’s so fucking clever.’

‘Sean, mate, shut your gob, won’t you?’ Carly was there. He felt her grip on his arm. ‘Save it for the morning when you’re sober.’

‘D’you like me, Carly?’

‘Course I like you, you’re my mate.’

‘But do you love me? Could you love me?’

‘No, Sean. Don’t take it personally. It’s just that you’re a bloke.’

‘What would you say to him?’ She tipped ground coffee into a cafetière as she waited for the kettle to boil.

‘Just, you know, wondering if there’s any news, a date for the inquest and how’s Holly, that sort of thing. But then I thought I’d phone Stacey first, at least we know her. We don’t really know Keith.’

‘Did you? Phone Stacey?’

‘Mmm...’

‘Was she okay with you? She clearly doesn’t want to speak to me.’ The water steamed and bubbled as she poured it on to the grounds and plunged down to squeeze the flavour out.

‘Don’t you let it stand?’ He said sharply.

‘Shall I chuck it out and start again?’

‘No, no, not on my account, I’m sure it’ll be fine. I would have been perfectly happy with instant.’

She knew that wasn’t true. She reached up for the cups and sat down on the opposite side of the breakfast bar.

‘Stacey. You were telling me about your conversation with Stacey.’

‘Ah, well, there’s the thing,’ he said. ‘I did phone and I thought I’d got a wrong number. It was an older sounding woman. She said Stacey had moved out. Gave me another number, she’s at Something-or-other-Farm. I just got an answer machine there, but I swear it was that bloke’s voice, the one with the van.’

‘Mackenzie?’

‘I didn’t feel like leaving a message.’

Karen was stunned. She swore and then apologised to her father in the same breath.

‘It’s a lonely business being widowed.’ He stirred his coffee, his eyes fixed on the brown whirlpool he was making. ‘Don’t be too quick to judge.’

She couldn’t tell him that she was in no position to judge anyone else’s morals. Just then Ben came crashing through the kitchen door and asked if Grandpa would take him to the park. Karen looked out of the window. The constant rain had finally abated and a watery sun was trying to break through.

‘Would you Dad? I think I need to go into the office for a while.’

Jaz was rummaging through file boxes in the boardroom. He looked pleased to see her. 

‘I can’t find Mr and Mrs Moyo,’ he said.

‘Their file?’

‘No, them. I’ve managed to postpone the appeal date until March, but they’ve disappeared. When they moved out of the house in Leeman Road, I thought someone from the church was putting them up. But they haven’t been in contact.’

‘Shall I try the Reverend Wheatley?’

‘Brilliant, thank you.’ He took the stairs two at a time and disappeared into his tiny office under the roof.

Karen logged on and waited for her home page to appear. These computers were second or third-hand from some other charity and painfully slow to get started. She found the spreadsheet she’d made for the Moyos and rang the church. After speaking to a cleaner, who happened to pick up the phone, she finally got a number for the vicar. It wasn’t good news. The Moyo family hadn’t been to church for several weeks. He’d tried to find them somewhere to stay when they were evicted from their house, but it had fallen through. In his last conversation with him, Rudo had mentioned a job offer, which came with accommodation, but he’d been cagey about the details. Elizabeth had stopped attending school and it was really preying on the vicar’s mind that Mrs Moyo’s baby would soon be due.

She thanked the Reverend Wheatley, and made a neat set of bulleted notes, which she sent to Jaz’s inbox. She stared at the screen for a while. It was like looking into a swimming pool and trying to guess the temperature. She checked her contacts, picked up the phone and dialled a number.

‘Can I speak to DCI Moon?’

‘Give him my regards,’ Jaz said, over her shoulder.

‘Jesus, Jaz,’ she covered the receiver, ‘I wish you wouldn’t sneak up on me. I didn’t hear you come downstairs.’ He’d taken off his shoes and a pair of purple socks stuck out from his suit trousers. The switchboard at the Human Trafficking Service was playing Nina Simone.

‘Been doing yoga,’ he said. ‘Natalie’s been teaching me. Trying to de-stress. You getting on better with Moon then?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘That night in the pub, he said you had a row and went home. He tried to follow you, to make sure you were okay or something.’

‘Oh, that,’ she shrugged, wishing Charlie would mention it if he was going to tell lies on her behalf. ‘I was worrying about my brother and he wasn’t very sympathetic, that’s all.’

At least that last bit had a ring of truth, even if it was ancient history. Jaz shuffled back upstairs as Charlie came on the line.

‘I need to talk to you about Johnny Mackenzie,’ Karen said.

‘Oh? Hello. This is nice.’

‘What do you know about him?’ Karen said.

‘Right. Mackenizie. In what context?’

‘My brother was working for him and he was sniffing round my sister-in-law, now it seems she’s moved in with him.’

‘Ah.’ 

‘What does that mean?’

‘Well, let’s just say he’s of interest to HTS.’ There was a pause. She could hear him breathing.

‘Look Charlie, I can’t bear the thought of that man being around Holly. He’s dodgy.’

‘Dodgy isn’t a term that would stand up in court, but from the evidence that’s coming together, I’d have to say that your instincts about Mr Mackenzie are probably bang on, but just for now, please, and I know this is hard, don’t say a word to your sister-in-law.’

She promised and put the phone down. She opened up a document and punched some numbers into a spreadsheet, looked at them and deleted them again. She tried to force her concentration back on to her work but her mind wouldn’t stay on one thing. When the phone on her desk rang, she nearly jumped out of her chair.

‘Let’s meet up,’ Charlie said.

‘What?’

‘Come on. I’ve been waiting for you to call and now you have, it just happens that I’ve got the afternoon off. I can be in York in an hour, if I make the next train.’

She met him at the station and they turned right, away from the city centre, cutting down a snicket. She let him hold her hand, dropping his when they emerged into a street of hotels. The chances of seeing someone she knew were too high.

He checked into an anonymous-looking chain hotel and she realised he’d booked it on his way there. Once inside the room, they began undressing each other, undressing themselves, heads stuck in jumpers, elbows poking through inside-out sleeves. She wondered if she needed a drink to see this through, but then he was laughing at himself, at her. They looked like a pair of scarecrows. The laughter carried them both on to the bed, where they lay looking at each other naked. They weren’t laughing now, just listening to the sound of their breathing. He traced his fingers across her collar-bone and smoothed his palm over her breast, while she ran her hands around his pelvis. He surrounded her lips with his and drew her tongue into his mouth. They kissed and touched and pulled back just to look, and then their hands and fingers found each other. When she could hardly bear it any longer, he eased himself over her, taking his weight on one arm, raising her back with the other, drawing her up to him as he pushed himself into her. She let go straight away, meeting his rhythm with her own. It was smooth and effortless, and as she buried her nose in his neck, she breathed in the smell of his skin.

When it was over, he wrapped himself around her back and they lay like spoons. In time, they must have fallen asleep because when she woke, she wondered why it was so light. She remembered then that it was mid-afternoon, that she was in a hotel bed and this was Charlie’s arm curled heavily round her waist. It wasn’t until she looked at her watch that she sat up with a jolt.

‘Oh, my God, I have to make a phone call!’ She scrambled to her feet, the bed sheet tangling around her legs. Her bag was by the door and she shivered, gathering her clothes haphazardly towards her. She was cold and naked and late again.

Charlie offered to make her a cup of coffee, but she had to go.

‘My Dad’s with the kids. I wasn’t going to be out this long. I’ll have to say I got stuck at work.’

She made the call and dressed quickly, leaning against the door fame, watching him making himself a drink in the nude. There was a copy of the Guardian newspaper on the floor where he’d dropped his coat. He must have been reading it on the train. The headline caught her eye. Beneath it was a picture of a crowd, waving red flags emblazoned with black eagles.

‘Where’s that?’

‘Kosovo. My brother Hugh’s been posted there with the Welsh Guards. Making sure they don’t fry up the Serbs on their independence barbecues. Can’t be worse than Basra.’

She’d been dimly aware of something on the radio in the past couple of days, but a missing child and an impending financial crisis had eclipsed it. She peered at the paper. In the photo, huge yellow letters spelled out the word NEWBORN.

‘Independence?’

‘It was announced two days ago. They’ve had to wait a long time.’

In the photograph there was a crowd of faces, young and old, some half way up lampposts. There was an older woman in a headscarf and next to her a younger man was smiling, waving both arms in the air. He looked so like Phil. People, unremarkable people. There could be any number of faces in the world like his or like the man on the other side of him, whose lined face smiled at the camera or like the figure in the foreground, sitting astride his friend’s shoulders.

‘What are you thinking?’ Charlie touched her cheek.

‘About Phil. I think I would find it easier to believe that he’s really dead if I’d seen him. I should have insisted.’

‘It might not have looked like him, you know that, don’t you?’

She did, and she knew that she’d rather remember him healthy, young and full of life, like the man waving at the camera in the photograph.

The journey home seemed interminable. Charlie wanted to come with her, stay with her as long as he dared, but she needed to be on her own. She had been shaken by the photo in the paper, even though she knew it was a common effect of grief, a kind of madness that makes us see the faces of the dead all around us. The bus dawdled through the traffic, waiting for an eternity at the lights. The faces of strangers, flowing past on the pavement blurred as she stared and crystallised when she blinked. Between two houses she caught a glimpse of green: a playground, with metal structures, red, blue and yellow, like a miniature circus. A roundabout was spinning and she could just see the edge of it. A child disappeared and reappeared, again and again, until the bus pulled away. Now you see him, now you don’t.

At home, she rushed through her apology to her father. She needed a shower. She was heading for the stairs when the doorbell rang. Sophie opened it.

‘Is your mum in…oh, Karen, I’m so glad to see you!’

‘Trish, hi! Come in.’

She tried to act normally, while they sat in the kitchen drinking tea. Karen was sure Trisha would be able to smell Charlie on her, but her neighbour was pre-occupied with her own problems. She and Paul had taken a series of fertility tests and the results were strongly indicating that he was unlikely to conceive. Karen was only half-listening, but she could hear the desperation in Trisha’s voice.

‘I’ll try anything,’ she was saying.

‘Unlikely though, Trish, that doesn’t mean never, and the fact that he’s got kids already.’

‘That’s something else, it turns out he and his first wife had fertility treatment too, he just never said. Seven years ago, I mean, the twins are nearly eight. His fish just don’t swim Karen. They were slow then, but it looks like they’re going nowhere now.’

The clock in the hall struck six and Karen still hadn’t had her shower. Max was due back anytime now. She found herself promising Trisha a girly lunch when things were quieter at work and managed to get her out of the door. She locked herself in the bathroom and was just about to step into the jet of hot water, when she heard the phone ring. She willed Reg or Sophie to answer it. Tipping her head back into the water, she let it drum against her skull, tasting it in her mouth. Her mind raced, hammering a thousand different thoughts through her head. Then the hammering was outside her, a fist pounding on the door. ‘Mum! Mum!’ She heard Sophie’s voice over the roar of the water in her ears. She stopped the shower, and stood dripping, starting to chill instantly.

‘Grandpa says you’ve got to come. He says it’s urgent!’

‘I’m coming, I won’t be a minute.’

Wrapped in Max’s huge bath towel, water ran off her feet and into the carpet as she came downstairs.

‘Funny time for a shower.’ Reg sounded irritable.

‘This isn’t about my washing habits. What’s happened? Is Ben all right?’ She heard the snappiness in her voice and regretted it straight away.

‘Stacey wasn’t going to tell us, but I left a message for Keith Clegg, said I was here, he just phoned back. He thought we knew. It’s the bloody inquest. It’s tomorrow.’