Читать книгу The Disappeared - Ali Harper - Страница 9

Jo had taken off her gloves and given up writing everything down. Mainly, I think, because she couldn’t keep coming up with alternative ways to write, ‘shapeless black jumper’ or, ‘pair of black canvas trousers with ripped hole in the knee’. As I watched the mountain of jumble grow higher, I did wonder what Jack was doing for clothes. It was March, but still bitterly cold – hardly time to be dispensing with jumpers. Had he decided on a whole new wardrobe direction or had he gone somewhere that clothes didn’t matter?

Which, of course, begged the question, where don’t clothes matter? I sparked up a fag and mulled it over. Two answers came to mind: a nudist beach in the South of France and the bottom of a lake. For some reason I couldn’t get the second one out of my head. I glanced at the clock. Four hours we’d been on the case, and I’d been quietly confident we’d have something for Mrs Wilkins by now. If not her son himself, at least news of his current address. Instead, all I could tell her was that he was mixed up in the supply of Class As and was probably naked.

Jo stood and crossed the room to retrieve the third bin liner. She left behind her a space on the floor, the brown carpet tiles resembling an island in a sea of black clothing. I watched her wrestle the knot for a few seconds, before giving up and ripping a hole in the side of the bag. A volcano of balled-up pairs of socks erupted. Jo frowned.

‘How many?’

The contrast of the neatly paired socks, different colours – blue, grey, tan – next to the heap of the rest of Jack’s clothes struck me. ‘They’re all brand new,’ I said, picking up the pair that had rolled closest to me. They had that unwrinkled freshness of having never been worn or washed. ‘Why would you have a million pairs of brand new socks?’

Jo freed two socks from their conjoined ball. She held them up, like Christmas stockings, then cocked her head to one side, her eyebrows knotting. I thought I heard something, a scrunching sound. Jo let one sock drop to the floor, and I watched her wrinkle up the other, like she was about to put it on. She turned it inside out, and as she did a wad of tightly folded paper popped out. Jo’s blue eyes shone. She’s got the most amazing eyes has Jo and the make-up she wears accentuates them, so that sometimes I catch people transfixed as they’re talking to her. She grinned at me as she smoothed out the bundle, and I realized what it was we were looking at.

‘Wowzer.’

I did the same to the pair I was holding. An identical wad of cash fell out. I picked it up and smoothed out the clutch of twenty-pound notes. I counted them out, as Jo snapped on another pair of gloves. When I’d finished I stared at her.

‘Ten. Ten twenty-pound notes. Ten times twenty? That’s two hundred quid.’

Jo nodded, indicating she had what I had. We both checked our second socks. Same result.

Jo grabbed a third pair. I didn’t, I was too busy trying to do the maths. I assessed the piles of socks. At least fifty pairs. Two hundred quid in each sock, two socks in each pair. That’s like what? My brain refused to do the sums, so I reached for my phone off the edge of the desk, as Jo popped out another wedge of cash.

‘Twenty grand.’ I sat back on the floor, propped up against the wall. ‘Give or take …’

Neither of us spoke for a moment. I felt a shiver, like someone had breathed down the back of my neck. I ran to the window and tugged the string that pulled the vertical blinds closed, making sure every centimetre of the dark glass was covered.

‘Get me some envelopes,’ said Jo. ‘We need to get this straight.’

Jo un-balled sock after sock and counted out piles of cash, every so often stopping to tuck a wedge of notes into a brown envelope and write something on the front.

I sat back and tried to work out what was going on in Jack’s life. If he owed his dealers, why didn’t he just hand over the cash? Why leave it at his house, wrapped in pairs of black, brown and blue socks? Why leave his clothes behind? Had he been planning on coming back?

‘Sixty,’ said Jo, when she’d sealed the last pile of cash into an envelope.

‘Sixty grand?’ I felt light-headed.

‘Sixty pairs of socks. Twenty-four grand.’

I crossed my legs and reminded myself to breathe from my belly and let the weight sink into the floor through my sitting bones.

‘Well. Our first case has been good for business, even if we haven’t solved anything,’ said Jo.

‘We can’t keep it.’

‘You think we should give it to his mum?’ From the tone of her voice, I gathered Jo didn’t think much to this idea.

‘I’m thinking his dealers are bound to come looking for it sooner or later. His note.’ I pulled it from my pocket. ‘It says, “when they come looking for me”. They must know where he lives.’

Jo reached up to help herself to a handful of rubber bands from the desk tidy and bundled the envelopes together.

‘Why would he post smack but not mention the cash?’ I asked out loud. Another thought hit me. We’d just removed heroin with a street value of God knows what and twenty-four grand in cash. ‘Shit. They’re going to go to his house and—’

‘We left them our business card,’ Jo finished the sentence for me. She straightened up from her position and stretched out her back. ‘Might not be a bad thing. They can come round here; we can give them the money; they tell us where Jack is. Everyone’s a winner.’

‘Mmm.’ I wasn’t convinced. ‘If it’s that easy, why didn’t Jack give them the money?’

‘He got greedy?’

‘If he got greedy, why’d he leave it behind?’

‘Maybe he got scared.’

‘If he got scared, why’d he run without his clothes?’

‘I dunno.’ Jo was obviously bored playing twenty questions, which was a shame because I had a whole stack more. She got onto her knees, used the desk to pull herself to standing. ‘I’ll lock this in the safe for now.’

She went through to the back room with twenty-four neatly labelled envelopes, a thousand pounds in each.

‘Don’t forget this.’ I lobbed the tin of heroin at her, and she caught it one-handed. While she was gone, I stuffed Jack’s clothes back into what was left of the bin bags. There were two more bags still to open.

‘The safe’s full,’ said Jo, coming back into the room. ‘Find anything else?’

‘More clothes. Some copies of the Socialist Worker, an old bus pass. Not much to show for a life, is it?’

‘He’s not doing bad. Twenty-four grand in savings.’

‘Hardly think they’re savings.’

‘But still—’

‘What’s not here?’ I asked. ‘If these are all his worldly goods?’

‘No computer, no iPad, no phone,’ said Jo, sitting on the edge of the desk.

‘Good point. Pants said he’d nicked Brownie’s PlayStation. So he’s taken electrical goods.’

‘To sell.’

‘Doesn’t make sense. Why nick a PlayStation and leave behind twenty-four grand?’

‘No toothbrush. No toiletries.’

‘We should ask Pants about that. Maybe they’re in the bathroom. It would be useful to know if he took his toothbrush.’ I scrawled a note on the pad on the desk.

Jo yawned. ‘What now?’

It wasn’t like we had much to go on. ‘Let’s try The Warehouse. They might know something there. And we might bump into Brownie.’

It struck me that I should have taken a notebook to the squat. My memory’s not great at the best of times. I felt like a schoolgirl with an appointment to see the headmaster. How was I going to explain this to Mrs Wilkins?

When I first had the idea for this business, I’d had visions of the kind of experiences Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell preside over on Long Lost Family – the ecstasy on people’s faces as I reunited them with lost loves. Not that I’m in it for the gratitude, but I want to make a difference. I know what it’s like to live with the ghosts of the disappeared.

But I had this quiet but persistent voice inside me, saying that that kind of arm flinging, oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-it’s-you, tears, laughter, hugging experience wasn’t going to be happening. In fact, the monologue inside my head continued, I should keep my nose out. Dealers, large sums of money, smack. It was obvious nothing good was going to come of this.

But it’s like I’ve got this kind of death wish when it comes to family. I’m driven by something I can’t explain, something about belonging and the self-awareness, the understanding that comes with it. I need it to work out.

I need to find the family that works. Because Christ knows, mine didn’t.