You Will Never Find Me (3 page)

‘What we need to talk about now is any . . . er . . . events that you can think of that might have been a factor in Amy wanting to leave home,' said Weaver.

‘She's always been a strong, determined girl, but she was very sweet and loving until some sort of hormonal explosion at fourteen, when she went up to her room as one sort of person and came down the following morning as another. That crisis has deepened over the years, to the point of continuous antipathy towards me in particular—seeing as we are the ones living together—and Charlie whenever she has the opportunity. But no, there wasn't a specific incident,' said Mercy.

Weaver and Jones turned their hard faces to Boxer.

‘Look,' said Boxer, open-palmed, ‘I'm not going to paint myself as totally blameless. I've been an absent father much of the time. I had a job that took me out of the country for more than half the year.'

‘What job was that?'

‘I was a kidnap consultant with GRM, a big private security company, running negotiations all over the world, but I'm freelance now. Amy was becoming too much of a handful for Mercy to manage alone with the kind of job she has. I left the company nearly two years ago so that I could choose my work to fit in with spending more time with my daughter. I've developed a relationship with another company called Pavis Risk Management, who give me as much contract work as I want.'

‘And you're in the kidnap unit with Specialist Crime Directorate 7 under DCS Makepeace?' said Weaver, turning to Mercy.

‘It's a time-consuming job with uncertain hours. I've done my best to look after Amy, and when work's got in the way I've sent her to family members living here in south London or to Charlie's mother in Hampstead.'

‘Did you ever hit your daughter?'

‘No,' said Boxer emphatically.

The two officers looked at Mercy, who was saying nothing.

‘Ms. Danquah?'

‘I hit her once, yes,' said Mercy.

This was news to Boxer.

‘And what were the circumstances, Ms. Danquah?' asked Jones.

‘Just before last Christmas, school had finished. She stayed out all night. She didn't call on Sunday morning even. Her friend Karen, who'd been with her that night, had lost sight of her in a place called Basing House in Shoreditch. She was last seen dancing with a black couple with bleached-blonde hair. I was worried sick, calling her and texting her. I even ran down the management of Basing House, who were surprisingly understanding and told me to call the police. Then at two o'clock, Sunday afternoon, she breezes back in here as if she's been for an after-lunch stroll in the park, with that “no worries” look on her face. I was beside myself. Relieved but totally furious. And of course Amy knows how to do it to me. She saw my state and knew she was to blame so she wound me up and I blew. I slapped her once, hard, across the face, which at that point was being dangled in front of me, just daring me to do it. And she knew that where I come from, a very strict Ghanaian upbringing, my father beat us all the time, and it wasn't just slaps across the face, it was canes across the back, buttocks and legs. And that was for getting seven out of ten in a spelling test, not staying out all night in a club in Shoreditch.'

Weaver and Jones were transfixed. This was no performance. They knew London kids and the extremes they could take you to.

‘And I was sorry,' said Mercy. ‘I was sorry for what I'd done, because when I'd suffered at my father's hands I promised myself that I would never do the same to a child of mine. And there I was smacking her. I grovelled. I begged for forgiveness. The look I got back from her was one of total triumph. She slammed her bedroom door in my face.'

‘In the letter she left at the station the reasons she gave for leaving home were “excessive discipline and harsh treatment with occasional violence”,' said Weaver.

‘And the word abuse cropped up a few times,' said Jones. Mercy blurted an incredulous laugh, the emotion uncontainable.

‘Abuse?' she said. ‘Amy doesn't know the meaning of the word. She should see what I've seen on the estates in Stockwell and Brixton.'

Boxer put an arm around Mercy's shoulders, felt her trembling, the lava boiling in the maternal pit.

‘I wanted to take Mercy out of the line of fire,' said Boxer. ‘Amy's campaigns were relentless. The more she realised how much she could hurt Mercy the more inventive she became. But Amy's never lived with me. I didn't have the home or the life to offer that alternative.

‘I'm sure you two have seen a few things in your time around here in south London—the teenage knifings. I was in the Gulf War before I did a few years as a homicide detective. Mercy has done twenty years in the police—beat, murder and kidnap. All that experience counts for nothing when you come up against the arrogance of youth. They think because of the marvellous connectivity of their brave new world that they miraculously know everything, even without having faced it, and that all we're doing, as their parents, is laying down unnecessary boundaries to contain their natural enthusiasm for life. They don't know what we know.'

‘You're making it sound as if running away might give her some useful work experience,' said Jones.

‘But we know she's not equipped for it. She can be clever and manipulative in her own world and be successful. She's experimented with Mercy as her lab rat. But put her out there in real life and she won't cut it. People will take one look and see an opportunity. For all this so-called “excessive discipline” she's actually been wrapped in cotton wool.'

‘That's what you think,' said Weaver, ‘but you don't seem to know too much about her. The driving licence?'

‘She's secretive. We're busy,' said Boxer.

‘Maybe if you'd spent more time with her?' said Weaver, which earned him a look from Jones. Weaver had kids and, even on the way here, he'd been whining about how little he saw of them.

‘Since she was fourteen
she
hasn't wanted to spend even ten minutes in our company,' said Mercy. ‘It's tough having breakfast with her. The disdain fills the room. I'd rather take my coffee outside.'

‘You sound glad she's gone,' said Jones.

Mercy turned to her slowly as if she'd just discovered a wind-up artist in the room.

‘Maybe you don't know what it's like to love a child,' said Mercy. ‘There's no choice and you don't have any control over it from the moment they're born. It's not like being with a guy and thinking, look at all the grief I'm getting from this arsehole, time to move on. The child is a part of you. It would be like walking away from the best part of myself. And now she's gone I don't feel, thank God for that, at last I've got some . . . what's it called?
Me
time, whatever
that
is. What I feel, Detective Sergeant Jones, is complete emptiness, as if the best love I've ever known has buggered off. And it's my fault. I'm the failure. She
loved
me.'

The tears came as a surprise to everyone in the room, including Mercy. They streaked rapidly down her face, unchecked. Jones couldn't look at her, regretted her cheap trick. Wanted to hug her.

‘That's why it's so bloody difficult,' said Mercy. ‘You love someone to pieces. Unconditionally. And they know it. And when they realise they have such total power over you, as a kid, with no understanding of that bond. They . . . they punish you with it for everything they suffer: the boredom, the inadequacy, the sexual tension, the hormonal chaos, the social ineptitude. Everything. They do it because you're responsible for bringing them into this confusing, incomprehensible world and they do it because they can do it safely, and part of me thinks they do it because they can't help it. It's nature's way of preparing you to be split up. So that the child can eventually go her own sweet way and neither of you feels too badly about it. But don't get me wrong, Detective Sergeant Jones, I want her back. She's not ready to be out there on her own. If I don't get her back, I can tell you, it will leave me with a big empty hole inside.'

A huge pendulous silence, as of the inside of a barrage balloon, filled the room. Boxer was stunned to hear Mercy speak like that. Only now did he realise what she'd had pent up inside her. It wasn't as if they hadn't talked about these things, it just had never been with such intensity.

‘The first line of the letter she left in the station instructed us not to reveal the contents to you,' said Weaver. ‘Apart from what I've already mentioned, I can tell you that it was written in a calm tone and rationally laid out all her reasons for leaving home. She didn't want us to consider her a missing person. She was just starting up an alternative life. The only reason we're following this up is because of the allegations she made about you.'

‘That sounds as if you're not actually going to look for her,' said Boxer.

‘You haven't told us that she's suffering from any mental health problems. She's over sixteen, which is the legal age for leaving home. She has money. She won't be living on the streets. It's extremely disconcerting for you, I know, but for me to allocate time to this would not impress my superiors.'

‘There's a very good organisation called Missing Persons . . . ' said Jones.

‘I know,' said Boxer. ‘I run a charitable foundation myself, called LOST. We find missing people, but only when the police have given up.'

Uneasy glances were exchanged.

‘All this information about Amy will be posted on the Police National Computer, which means—'

‘We know what it means,' said Mercy.

‘Some photos,' said Jones, ‘that would be useful . . . '

‘We don't have any recent photos. She's refused to be photographed since she was fourteen,' said Mercy. ‘If we find any . . . '

The policemen, nodded, stepped forward. Now they shook hands. Boxer walked them to the door, let them out, went back to the living room. A tap on the front door brought him back. DS Jones was there, hands deep in her coat pockets.

‘The last line of her letter said, “If you do investigate my disappearance and I am found, under no circumstances are either of my parents or anyone else in my family to be informed.” I'm sorry. We weren't supposed to tell you that either. I just wanted to clarify our position here. The DI's not being a bastard.'

Boxer thanked her, closed the door. ‘What was all that about?' asked Mercy.

He told her and it was as if he'd jabbed her in the guts with a kitchen knife. She curled up and howled.

 

They went back to the dance floor, took it by storm. El Osito's shirt was drenched in seconds, his muscles stood out under the changing lights. He flicked his head back on its bull neck and the sweat sprayed in sparkling droplets.

She was standing at the bar while El Osito went hunting for his friends. The barman came over, gave her a card, nodded at the note written on it and looked down the counter to a young guy standing there, who raised his beer and melted back into the darkness. The note said in English, ‘Be careful of your friend, he has a bad reputation with women.' She let the card drop to the floor.

El Osito came back, said his friends had gone. They left, went to Kapital and danced for hours, mesmerised by the music, with more coke crashing through their veins.

At five o'clock they were out in the street hailing a cab. They sat in the back and he talked non-stop to the cab driver as he slowly removed her underwear, stuffed the pants into his pocket. They arrived in some residential area about seven kilometres from the centre and El Osito asked the cabbie to pull over at the Metro station of Pan Bendito. They walked to his apartment block, which was up a rough cement pathway behind the Bar Roma. The entrance wasn't quite as luxurious as she'd been expecting for a man with so much coke on him.

Only now did it suddenly occur to her that she was breaking all the rules. She was drunk and drugged with no idea where she was, with a strange man whose rough, hard hands led her to believe that he was not unaccustomed to violence. Fear was shimmering on the outer reaches of her consciousness as he walked her past the cracked glass of the metal-framed door of the block's main entrance.

‘Maybe we should go back to the Hotel Moderno,' she said. He gripped her elbow so hard she winced and couldn't wrench her arm free.

The lift worked. The doors opened and he shoved her so hard into the filthy cubicle that she hit the far corner and had to save herself with her free arm. She tried to turn, but he was on her, rucking her dress up over her hips, reminding her of her panty-less state. She looked down at something suspect in the corner that had the tackiness of recently dried bodily fluids. Panic trembled in her throat as she felt his powerful urgency, the animal strength beneath the cold, sodden shirt. The lift door opened at the fourth floor. He backed away from her, pulled her round. She tried to push her dress back down and made a run for the door to the stairs. ‘Don't do that,' he said, and leaned forward, pushing her hard so that she missed the door and hit her head against the brick wall next to it. She fell onto all fours, tried to get to her feet, remembering El Osito's impression of a cow on ice. She climbed up the rough wall, hiding her face behind her arm, not wanting to see what was going to come next.

It was the turn of
la pata grande
. He slapped her so hard that she collided with another wall, bounced off it and fell to the floor, hot buttocks on the ice-cold tiles. He grabbed her by the swag of her ringlets, shook her like a naughty pup and dragged her to the door of his apartment. He unlocked it with her still hanging from his brutal fist, threw her into the hallway, slammed the door shut behind him.

In the dark she started to scrabble away from him and he trod down on her leg to stop her as if she were some struggling animal that he still wanted to play with. The only sound was of his belt snarling and snapping through the loops as he tore it from his waist. She remembered that scorpion clasp and the thought of its sting made her whimper.