Читать книгу Then You Were Gone - Claire Moss - Страница 15

Chapter Seven

Keith had not been back to the office for three days. Of course not. Not when Jazzy wanted to speak to him. The man had a sixth sense about where he was least wanted, then made sure to be there whenever possible.

In fact, it was not even that Jazzy wanted to speak to Keith. He never wanted to speak to Keith. He knew he ought to, knew that Keith, if anyone, would be able to shed light on Mack’s past. But he had tried and tried to imagine how the conversation might go, and he just couldn’t. If Keith genuinely did not know where Mack was, then he would be worried by now – worried enough to say something to Jazzy or come into the office again or send out a bunch of his loaf-headed henchmen as a search party. And the fact that he had done none of those things surely meant that he knew where Mack had gone, or at least had some idea as to why. And if he wanted Jazzy or Simone to know these things, Keith would have told them. But he hadn’t.

When Simone had come to Jazzy and Petra’s house three nights ago with Mack’s exam certificates and that inexplicable birth certificate, it was the first time that Jazzy had felt genuinely afraid of what Mack might be running from. He had looked at the two certificates, one marking the pinnacle of a young man’s academic career, one marking the birth of a baby girl, daughter of Maria Novak, ‘father unknown’, at a hospital in Lewisham seventeen years ago and tried, without success, to connect the two, all the while Petra’s words echoing in his head. How well do you really know this guy?

Simone had asked him what he thought. ‘I don’t think anything,’ was the only truthful answer he had been able to give. He had, for the first time, truly understood what people meant when they said their mind had gone blank. It had been as though he was staring into a very bright light, blinding him to everything and wiping any coherent thought from his brain.

The exam certificate thing was probably nothing. It could just be inverse snobbery, be Mack pretending to be more street than he really was. Jazzy possessed just about enough self-awareness to realise that Mack, with his flawless sense of social infrastructure, knew that if he was trying to impress someone like Jazzy, then better to be a comprehensive school boy made good than a scholarship boy desperately trying to ingratiate himself with the boarders. The birth certificate thing though was weird, and scary. Jazzy had seen enough films and read enough airport thrillers to know that you could fake someone’s identity by using a stolen birth certificate – usually a dead person’s. Ayanna had told him that Mack had asked for a fake birth certificate. He wanted one for himself, Jazzy supposed, but he had not said anything about one for someone else. Maybe he hadn’t needed to, because he had already managed to get that person one.

Jazzy cleared his throat and gagged on the acid reflux that came up. He took a swig from the bottle of Gaviscon that was open on his desk. It was one thing for Mack to disappear; it was one thing for him to buy a fake identity before doing so. It was another thing altogether to be dealing in fake identities for seventeen-year-old girls with eastern European names.

Jazzy had let the last few days go by in the hope that something would happen to make all this go away; that Mack would walk back through the door as though nothing had happened and nobody would ever mention it again. That would suit Jazzy just fine. But now it was after eleven-thirty in the morning, and Mack had been gone for over a week. Jazzy had spent most of the day so far ignoring the work that had been piling up, and staring instead at the office door. He wanted Mack to breeze in and tell him he had been having a prolonged dirty weekend with a ladyboy he met on the internet, or that he had had a vivid and delusional nervous breakdown, but that he was all better now. He wanted Ayanna to come in and tell him that, oh yes, she forgot to mention, here was that forwarding address Mack had asked her to give him, and that by the way her brother had accidentally left one of the fake birth certificates for Latvian prostitutes that he dealt with in amongst Mack’s fake papers and could he have it back please? He wanted Keith to come in and shoot Jazzy through the head with a stolen gun and then he wouldn’t have to worry about anything any more. He wanted to SLEEP, for Christ’s sake!

Ayanna had not been in to work since she had told him about Mack asking her to help him hide. Nobody had been to clean the office at all for the first couple of days, but today when there had still been no sign of a cleaner by ten o’clock Jazzy had rung the cleaning company, to be told that ‘somebody’ would be round within the hour. ‘Somebody’ had been, but it had not been Ayanna, rather a man in his late twenties or early thirties of indeterminate nationality who either did not speak or understand English or was unbelievably rude, or both. Jazzy had asked the woman at the agency whether Ayanna might be coming back, and she had laughed a throaty smoker’s cackle and said, ‘Dear me, love, I wouldn’t have a clue. You don’t expect them to tell me, do you? I’m just their employer.’

Jazzy had rarely felt so old – or so conspicuous – as he did standing in this semi-circle of paved ground dotted with benches and water features. It was the feature entrance plaza of the spanking new sixth form centre of Ayanna’s college, built only months before the economy went tits up. He had been sitting on one of the benches for a few minutes, believing that his six foot four frame and receding hairline would stand out less if he was seated, and in that time he had realised that he needed to get inside the building.

Jazzy was reminded of the time he first took a girl out. She had been a new pupil at his school’s sixth form, the stage at which girls and boys were allowed to mix, and she had, miraculously, agreed to meet him in a pub in town well known for serving under-age with no questions asked. But when Jazzy had arrived to meet her, he had left her sitting alone at a table for a full five minutes; he had not recognised her out of her school uniform. And he now found he was having the same problem placing Ayanna without her green tabard and hoody.

He had already seen at least four girls who could have been her – all tall, all slim, all black with long, straightened hair, all wearing skinny jeans and carrying cheap cotton shopping bags over their shoulders. To his utter mortification, he had jumped up and run after one of them, getting halfway across the plaza before he realised it wasn’t her. For God’s sake, he was lucky the police hadn’t already turned up to question him on suspicion of grooming. He forced in a deep breath and tried to calm himself; after all, he could easily be a lecturer taking a break between classes. Or, a much more disturbing thought occurred to him, he could be the father of one of these kids. He paused and did the maths; yes, it was a stretch but it was just about possible that he could be the dad of one of these heavily made-up young girls or skinny-jeaned young lads, all strutting around looking as though they were posing for a prospectus photo. He shook his head. That thought did not make him feel any better.

It was hopeless sitting here, he realised. So many students were constantly bustling in and out of the plate glass and chrome entrance hall that he could easily have already missed Ayanna. He needed to get inside and find his particular needle in this seething haystack of adolescent hormones.

The building was huge, and, as he stood gormlessly in the entrance lobby looking at the signs pointing to Rooms L8 – M22 and Floor G, every corridor that led away from the atrium looking identical, Jazzy saw at once that his only chance was to brazen it out. Not for the first time, he thanked whatever force of creation it was that had endowed him with such a trustworthy, unthreatening demeanour. OK, maybe he would never be CEO of his own multi-million-pound company, but he did come across as a nice guy, and sometimes that could be worth a lot.

He put a hand in his pocket and strode, smiling towards the central reception booth. ‘Hi.’ He leaned forward onto the counter and broadened the smile still further. If he acted as though he and the young man behind the desk had met before, he felt sure the guy would feel obliged to play along. ‘How’s it going?’

The young man smiled, only the smallest amount of wariness behind his eyes. ‘How can I help you?’

‘I’m just here to see Ayanna. Ayanna Abukar? I’m supposed to be meeting her outside her class but I’ve left my diary in the office so I don’t have a note of which room she’s in just now.’

The man blinked. He did not look much older than twenty. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude but… who are you?’ He flashed Jazzy an apologetic grin.

Jazzy laughed, as though acknowledging the absurdity of his having to ask. ‘I’m Sam, I’m her case worker.’ It was the vaguest job title he could think of that also sounded sufficiently important to allow him access to a student. Petra always told him that the main thing that prevented people achieving what they wanted in life was not knowing their limitations. Jazzy knew he was never going to be able to pass himself off as a nurse or a lawyer or a probation officer. He would be laughed out of the place in seconds. But he hoped he was both scruffy enough and middle class enough to pass muster as some kind of generic pastoral worker.

That, or maybe just the smile, seemed to work. The man typed something into his computer. ‘She’s in Chemistry right now,’ he said. He turned to look at the clock behind him. ‘She’ll be finished in about five minutes.’

Jazzy nodded. ‘OK. Thanks. And, erm, where exactly is…’

The man regarded him for a moment. ‘The labs,’ he said, gesturing behind him. ‘In the science block. If you just wait in the main corridor you should see her as she comes out.’

‘Brilliant, thanks a lot, mate.’ He turned and walked the way he had indicated. Shit. The whole point of making up those stupid lies was so he would not have to loiter in the corridor like a deviant or a dead-beat dad.

He found the science block and followed a long corridor with classrooms either side. Most of them were occupied and he peered through the doors’ glass panels trying to work out which one might be A-level Chemistry.

Jazzy had done Chemistry himself at sixth form and, scanning the white board in the first room he looked in, he was able to dismiss that class immediately. A cross-section of a spinal column. Biology. The next one was also Biology, the one after it was empty, then one with a class of fourteen teenage boys copying the longest mathematical formula he had ever seen. Physics, surely. The one after that, though, was more promising. The slide on the screen was titled: The electron configuration of an element. Jazzy felt his eyelids growing heavy with boredom at the mere memory. Bingo. Doing a quick scan of the corridor, he ascertained that the remaining two labs were empty. The electron configuration group must be Ayanna’s. Jesus, poor kid.