Читать книгу Critical Incidents - Lucie Whitehouse, Lucie Whitehouse - Страница 13

Robin looked up. High overhead, above two encircling galleries of shops, an arching roof of white concrete beams and curved glass captured the last light from the sky and poured it down. In her day, anyone arriving by train at New Street had to exit the station via the Pallasades, a shopping centre of epic grimness, low-ceilinged and lit like a prison, its insides full of Woolworths and SockShop and crappy health-food stores, the outside decaying brown concrete. That was all gone – obliterated – and now, as if born in the light of the explosion, there was this, Grand Central, clean and white and imposing, like a modern cathedral or one of those Southern US mega-churches. A cathedral of commerce.

‘I can’t believe you haven’t seen it yet,’ Maggie had said when she’d told her where she was meeting Lucy. ‘It’s ever so smart.’

‘Yeah, Rin’s been boasting about it.’ She’d stopped. Every couple of minutes she’d focus on something else, forget, then it body-slammed her again: Corinna was dead.

She was ten minutes early but when the escalator delivered her to the café at the top of the new John Lewis, Lucy was already waiting. She had on the same scarf she’d worn at the Christmas market, and her hair was down over the shoulders of a short black coat. Cheap black trousers, slightly scuffed high heels – career-dressing on a tiny budget. She worked as a PA for a firm of solicitors, she’d said on the phone. ‘Family law – divorces, custody disputes.’

At close range, she looked barely older than Lennie. Under a ton of mascara, her eyes were round as a pre-schooler’s. Though it had looked near-perfect in the Facebook photo, up close and unfiltered her skin was teenage: a smattering of acne dints below the cheekbones, an active spot half hidden by a lid of concealer.

‘Lucy? I’m Robin.’

There was a hiatus, a moment in which the choreography felt off, a physical move missing. Of course: no badge, the extraction from the pocket, the thumb-flip that established her authority. Instead she took out the little Muji case Maggie had given her at the same time as a pay-as-you-go mobile. Robin Lyons, Private Investigator, MH Investigation Services. She watched the girl scrutinize the card.

‘Shall we?’ she said ‘Tea? Why don’t you find a table and I’ll bring it over?’

Robin could see immediately why Rin had liked the café. Industrial spotlights and tiles, painted farmhouse tables and outsized lampshades – it was her taste all over. But that was true of John Lewis generally: not flashy or designer, but good quality, solid. It sold the illusion of a trustworthy, comfortable world. The idea made her want to put her boot under a table, send its cake-stands and shortbread flying. Lies.

Lucy had chosen a table by the window. She’d taken off her coat and was scrolling through her phone, which she dropped into her bag as Robin approached.

‘Thanks again for meeting me.’ She unloaded the tray and sat down.

‘No problem – I wanted to. We’re really worried – Harry and me,’ she clarified. ‘We were texting and calling but we kept getting voicemail. Then Valerie rang.’ In the light, the wisps of hair at her temples showed hints of ginger, and her skin was pale, its underlying tone blue. Some Celtic heritage, probably – Scots or Irish. Her hands were graceful, the fingers long and elegant despite a clutter of silver rings, eight or ten across the two hands. ‘We can’t believe the police won’t do anything. She wouldn’t just disappear.’

‘Okay. Before we start, I just want to say that as private investigators, not police, we – that’s Maggie, my colleague, and I – we’re not interested in getting anyone into trouble. We work for Valerie, and our job is just to find Becca.’

‘You think she’s all right?’

‘Do you not?’

Lucy looked down. ‘I don’t know.’

‘We’ve talked to Valerie, of course, but what someone tells their best friend is different from what they might tell their mum, right? I’m speaking for myself here, obviously.’ She’d intended the line to be mildly funny, to put Lucy at her ease, but it had come out sounding weird, confessional. She cleared her throat.

‘Basically, is there anything going on that she might have kept secret from her mum? Maybe something illegal – we know she used recreational drugs – or just something she didn’t want her to know. We can be discreet about where we get information; neither Valerie nor Becca need to know you told us anything if you don’t want that. For whatever reason. Okay?’

Lucy nodded.

‘So, is there anything new in her life, or unusual? Even if you don’t think it’s relevant. Was anything worrying her? Has she been in any trouble?’

‘No.’

‘Does she owe anyone money?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

Robin stirred her tea as if they had all the time in the world. ‘What about men? Becca’s lovely-looking, and her mum said she gets a fair bit of attention – was anyone bothering her?’

Lucy shook her head and her long silver earrings swayed, catching the light.

‘How about Nick, her ex?’

‘Nick?’ Surprise. ‘They broke up months ago and they didn’t go out that long in the first place. He’s with someone else now, from his work – we saw them shopping in the Bull Ring before Christmas.’

‘How did Becca feel about that? Him having found someone else.’

‘Fine. Not bothered. She was never that into him, she was the one who dumped him, and …’ She stopped.

Robin waited, leaving the space for her to fill, but Lucy took a sip of her tea and looked out of the window. Through a fine mesh – to block sun on the plate glass, Robin guessed; there was optimism for you – their view was two multi-storey car parks and a Fifties flat-roofed office building. Beyond those, the grungy, slab-sided Holiday Inn was dwarfed by an incongruous tower of shining silver-blue glass. In the murk at street level, the lights were beginning to come on, the February afternoon already dimming towards evening.

‘What about her new job, at The Spot?’

Lucy looked back. ‘It’s not that new, she’s been doing it a while now. September – we went there for Ryan’s birthday, another mate of ours. She’d been talking about going on holiday next summer – somewhere proper, you know – and she needed money. She said it looked fun to work there so she went in a couple of days later to ask. Have you been?’

‘Not yet.’

‘It’s not just a bar. They do food and there’s a club bit upstairs – DJs. The drinks are expensive, which is why it wasn’t our regular.’

‘Was it fun working there?’

‘She said so, yeah, she liked the people. It doesn’t shut ’til two so she was knackered if she had to do the close but it didn’t seem to bother her, really. She just slept in at the weekend.’

‘You never got the impression there was anything dodgy going on there?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Her mum doesn’t sound keen on it.’

A small shrug. ‘She thinks she’d be better off doing a college course, doesn’t she? But Becca’s not into it.’

‘If it meant earning more in her day job, though? She could save for a holiday without having to work nights.’

Another shrug. ‘Maybe. I mean, obviously she’d like to get paid more but it probably wouldn’t be enough, the difference. And it would take too long. And it’s still just working in an accounts office, isn’t it?’

‘She doesn’t like it?’

‘No, it’s not … She does, and the Hanley family – especially Roger, her boss, she likes him a lot – but it’s not setting the world on fire, is it? It’s not what you dream of when you’re a little girl: When I grow up I want to process invoices.’

‘You think she had something else in mind?’

‘Don’t we all?’ Lucy looked at her full-beam.

She knew, Robin realized suddenly. She’d told her her name on the phone – Lucy had Googled her and found the stories. Of course she had: what young person wouldn’t Google a total stranger claiming to be a private investigator?

‘I guess so,’ she said. ‘But she hadn’t talked about it? Hadn’t been making plans to go travelling sooner rather than later?’ She remembered Becca’s passport, still in the drawer.

‘No. I’d have told you. And Val, when she rang me. She’s doing her nut, isn’t she? I wouldn’t not say.’

‘How’s Becca’s mood been lately? Has she been down at all? Depressed?’

‘No. If anything, the opposite.’

‘Really? Any reason?’

‘I don’t think so.’ She looked to the window again, avoiding eye contact. Then, making a decision, she gave a short out-breath. ‘I don’t think it’s relevant – it’s not – but if this all goes … If something’s happened to her, I don’t want to be the one who didn’t say something that might have led – only indirectly, it won’t have anything to do with it at all, at all, but it’s information and—’

‘No one has to know it came from you, Lucy.’

‘Look, why I’m freaking out – I know she wouldn’t have just gone off somewhere because she had a reason to stay. A new reason.’

Robin felt it, the ratchet in her stomach that told her, progress.

‘They think I don’t know. And they’re only not telling me because of some stupid idea about it affecting our friendship or me feeling left out or something,’ she said. ‘Which is ridiculous because I’ve got Cal – that’s my boyfriend. Becca and Harry have started seeing each other. Well, not seeing – they’ve always seen each other. You know.’

‘They’ve got together – they’re sleeping together?’

‘Yeah. I mean, I imagine. They’re not telling me but they don’t exactly have to. The way they are around each other – like, we’ve known each other since we were eleven, we’re going to suddenly get shy?’

‘When did it start?’

‘Two or three months ago – December, the run-up to Christmas?’

‘What changed? Why suddenly, after all these years?’

Lucy shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s Southside? Hoo, you have been away. It’s what they’re calling it these days – China Town, the Gay Village, the theatres, that whole patch. Rebranding, isn’t it? Makes people see things differently.’ Maggie pulled hair out of her mouth. Upstairs, without a tree in sight, Robin hadn’t been aware of it but as she came down the long flight of steps to where Maggie had been waiting on the street, a bitter little wind had rushed to meet her, throwing her scarf in her face, whipping away body heat. She shoved her hands in her pockets.

A minute’s walk from Grand Central, they were back in the old city centre, brutal concrete and grimy glass, the Holiday Inn like a punch in the eye, Smallbrook Queensway and the long curved slug of the Ringway Centre, a line of low shops under four floors of grim concrete boxes that looked like somewhere you might have been sent in pre-Glasnost Russia if you’d made political enemies.

On the pedestrian island, sandwiched between four lanes of thundering traffic, Robin turned her face to the sky. Beam me up, Scotty, or god, or whoever. Just get me the fuck out of here. ‘All right?’ Maggie mouthed over the roar. She nodded.

Once they were under the bridge, things improved marginally. There was a boarded-up nightclub, a fried-chicken place, a bookies, but the buildings were older and lower-rise, the concrete less dominant. After a block, a pedestrian zone had a handful of actual trees, red Chinese lanterns in their branches, and the Hippodrome where she and Luke had been brought every Christmas by Granny Lyons for the panto. Christopher Biggins wearing tights, pelting the audience with Fox’s Glacier Fruits – good times.