The Disappeared

‘So, Jack,’ I said, feeling a change of subject was called for. ‘When did he leave?’

He ran a hand through his floppy dark hair. ‘I have no idea where he is.’

‘But he lives here?’

‘Used to. He skipped. A week or so back.’

‘Oh.’ My thoughts of a quick and easy solution to our first case sloped off into the middle distance. ‘Know where he went?’

He shook his head. ‘I have no idea, I swear. Did a runner, proper moonlight flit. Took Brownie’s PS4 with him.’

I took a seat next to Jo as the kettle boiled. ‘Any clue where he might have gone?’

‘Uh uh.’

‘Did he leave a forwarding address?’ I knew as the words came out of my mouth that they were overly naive.

‘Ever heard of someone doing a moonlight flit and leaving a forwarding address?’

‘Pants, what’s your problem?’ said Jo, folding her arms across her chest and leaning back in the chair. ‘It’s not like we’re not asking nicely.’

Pants stared at her, like he wanted to say something, but he checked himself.

‘You said you had his stuff,’ I said. ‘Does that not mean he’s coming back?’

‘No idea. He didn’t tell me his plans.’

‘Can we see it? His stuff?’

‘You mean the stuff from his room?’

‘Yeah, I guess.’ I still had the feeling we were speaking in riddles.

Pants thought about this for a moment, then he shrugged. ‘What do I care?’ He moved across to a door in the corner of the room and flicked back the bolt. ‘It’s in the cellar.’

I glanced at Jo. Was it wise to follow a man we’d only just met into a cellar? Possibly not, but six weeks of punching a leather bag had made my biceps swell and there’s a confidence that comes with that. Besides there were two of us, and he was barefoot.

‘After you,’ Jo said to him.

Pants went first, I followed, and Jo brought up the rear as we made our way down the narrow stone steps. When Pants got to the bottom he flicked a light switch. He nodded towards half a dozen bin liners in the corner of a small room that might have been where they once delivered coal. My first reaction was to grin.

‘That’s everything.’ Pants said. ‘I mean, apart—’

‘Can we look?’ asked Jo, already inspecting the bags.

Pants looked at me like he was daring me to say something. I shrugged as he squared back his shoulders. OK, we hadn’t got Jack, but we’d got his stuff: surely the next best thing. There had to be something in there that would tell us where he’d gone, who he was with. An old phone would be great. And we had something we could tell his mother. I practised the words in my head. Yes, that’s right, Mrs Wilkins, we’ve a few leads we’re working on.

‘Can we?’ I asked.

‘Bring them up. It’s freezing down here.’

I hadn’t noticed the temperature, but Pants’s bare toes were crunched up against the cold concrete.

Jo and I grabbed the necks of the nearest bin liners.

‘Pen’s supposed to be taking them to the charity shop.’

‘What’s in them?’ asked Jo, as we followed him back up the stairs, lugging the bags behind us.

‘Crap,’ said Pants. He returned to the kettle, poured the just boiled water into the mugs, while Jo and I went back for the last bags.

When we’d brought them back upstairs, Jo said: ‘They’re not very heavy.’

‘Clothes mainly.’

That wiped the grin from my face. I frowned, trying to make sense of what we knew. ‘He took Brownie’s PlayStation but left his own clothes?’ I tried to undo the knot at the top of the first bin liner, but it was tight.

‘Don’t open them in here,’ Pants said to me. ‘I’ve just hoovered.’

‘Has he got any mates?’ Jo asked. ‘Anyone who’ll know where he went?’

‘Only Brownie, and he doesn’t know.’

‘Where is Brownie?’

‘Out.’

‘Out where?’ said Jo, in a voice that said she was trying to be patient.

‘He’s gone to try The Warehouse again.’

We waited for him to expand.

‘Jack works there. Or he used to. Brownie’s gone down, looking for him.’ He opened the fridge and took out a carton of rice milk. ‘You’re not the only ones, you know. He owes his share of the gas bill.’

That surprised me. People living in squats pay gas bills? Struck me as a bit pedestrian. ‘Not the only ones what?’

‘How do you know he left?’ asked Jo, sitting back down at the table and returning to her roll-up.

‘What?’

She lit the end, her eyes screwed up against the smoke. ‘How do you know he’s not dead?’

Sometimes I hate Jo. She has this way of putting into words the things that lurk in the corner of your mind, the things you don’t want to think about. She just puts it right out there, like there’s nothing to be scared of. Pants kicked the fridge door shut with his foot.

‘He’s not dead.’

‘How do you know?’ Jo stared at Pants without blinking.

Pants didn’t say anything.

‘He might have fallen in the canal,’ Jo said.

‘What you trying to say?’

Wasn’t it obvious enough? I flinched as Jo continued to bat around the possibilities.

‘Been mugged, got run over?’

Jo listed the various tragedies as I tried not to think how plausible each of them sounded. More plausible than someone doing a runner in the buff with his housemate’s PlayStation.

‘Did you try the hospitals?’

Pants raised his eyebrows.

‘How do you know it was him that took the PS4?’ Jo paused and tapped the end of her cigarette into the ashtray on the table.

‘It’s obvious.’ He put two mugs on the table in front of us with a bit too much force, so that a splash of hot liquid leaped over the rim. ‘Who else? There was no break-in.’

I thought I saw him frown, his features darkened for an instant.

Jo didn’t let up with the questions. ‘Have you rung his family?’

He mopped at the spilt tea on the table with a dishcloth and then rinsed it in the sink. ‘He didn’t—’

‘Sounds like you didn’t give him much of a chance,’ said Jo.

I took my first sip of scalding tea. I love it so hot it burns the skin off the roof of your mouth. ‘She’s right,’ I said, after I’d thought about it for a moment. ‘If my flatmate went missing—’

Jo didn’t let me finish either. ‘Ever heard of the benefit of the doubt?’ she asked.

Pants folded his arms across his chest. The beginnings of a tattoo poked out under his T-shirt sleeve. ‘You didn’t live with him.’

‘He could be dead in a gutter for all you know,’ said Jo.

I got a sudden flash of my Aunt Edie, although she’d have said ‘dead in a ditch’. Guilt clawed my stomach lining. She’s my only living relative, and I hadn’t rung her in weeks.

‘Don’t you take the moral high ground with me,’ he said, his voice lower, quieter. He turned away.

I didn’t understand the sneer in his voice. My gaze followed his. I could see the tops of the trees on The Ridge through the kitchen window, still bare from winter and fading against the darkening sky.

‘His family’s not heard from him for three months,’ I said. ‘You can understand why they’re worried.’

He reached for a packet of Silk Cut that was on the high up mantelpiece above a gas fire. He lit one, inhaled in a way that made me think my initial hunch was right – he’d only just got up. As he exhaled he turned back to face us.

‘Oh, we heard from him.’

My patience snapped. ‘He’s rung?’

His gaze flicked to me like he’d forgotten I was in the room. ‘Would have been nice,’ he said. ‘But no.’

‘Then?’

‘Wait on,’ he said, disappearing through the kitchen door towards the hall.

Jo pulled a face, like she didn’t know what he was on about either.

He returned a moment later carrying a brown envelope. He held it upside down over the table and an Old Holborn tin fell out – the old-fashioned kind, orange and black with a row of what looked like Georgian houses on the lid. It clattered onto the table. Jo and I glanced at each other, a weird feeling blooming in my chest.

‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Open it.’

Chapter Three

A feeling of dread crept over me. Don’t ask me why. I’m starting to believe in sixth senses and I’m learning to trust my gut. It’s taken years, but, after what happened, well, let’s just say I learned the hard way. I knew whatever it was in that tin it wasn’t good. It had its own aura, a bad vibe, or some kind of shit.

Jo picked up the tin. It didn’t rattle, and I knew by the way she held it in her hand it had weight to it. She glanced up at Pants, then me, and she prised off the lid. I held my breath.

Inside was a small plastic bag plump with brown powder. I kind of hoped it was demerara sugar but a voice inside me said I was clutching at straws.

‘Smack,’ said Jo, her voice rising like she was asking a question, but one to which she already knew the answer.

‘Really,’ said Pants, the sarcasm hard to miss.

‘So …’ My brain tried to make sense of the messages my eyes were feeding it. ‘What? He posted you heroin? In lieu of the bills?’

‘Read the note.’ He tugged it out of the brown envelope, a piece of scruffy A4 paper, folded into quarters, and handed it to me. He dropped the envelope on the table. Jo held the bag, still inside the tin, to her nose. Then she gave it to me, and I did the same, like we were seasoned sniffer dogs. Pants went to stand back by the sink.

I unfolded the note and read it out loud.

‘“Soz, guys. Leeds does my head in. When they come looking for me, give them this and tell them I’ll sort the rest when I can. Sorry bout …”’ There was a word crossed out and I couldn’t make out what it said. Instead he’d continued, ‘“everything, but the less you know the better. Keep the faith. J.”’

‘Did you know he was into smack?’ asked Jo.

Pants looked uncomfortable. ‘Dunno. I don’t want to know.’

‘Who’s “they”?’ I asked, as I read the note again.

‘Funny.’ He glared at me. ‘Just take it and don’t come back.’

‘What?’

‘I’m serious.’

‘No,’ I said, as the realization of what he was thinking crept over me.

‘This isn’t how it was supposed to be,’ he said. ‘Not when we set it up. I don’t want to get involved.’

‘No,’ I said again. I’ve been accused of a few things in my time, but heroin dealer was a new low. ‘We’re private investigators, working for his family.’

‘Yeah, right.’ From his tone it was clear he didn’t believe me. ‘His family.’

‘Did you call the police?’ Jo asked as she replaced the lid on the tin.

‘What, to come to our squat to talk about the heroin one of our housemates just sent us?’ Pants stood with his arms folded across his chest. ‘Take it and go.’

‘Can we take his stuff too?’ asked Jo. She stuffed the tin into her jacket pocket. I frowned at her. She took a slurp of tea as she got to her feet.

‘I guess. We’re not planning a car boot.’

My cheeks felt warm. I hate misunderstandings. But in my experience, these things are hard to unravel. The more you pull, the more you tangle. Still, I gave it a limp shot.

‘We’re not drug dealers, you know.’

He didn’t show any sign that he’d heard me. Instead he continued to speak to Jo. ‘I just want it out of here. We’re on dodgy enough ground as it is.’

Jo had already stubbed out her cigarette, readying herself for the task of moving the bin liners. I folded the note, picked up the envelope and shoved both in my pocket. Pants helped us lift the bags out to the pavement in silence.

There were seven bin liners in all, added to the Old Holborn tin full of smack, and we had quite a haul. We crammed the sacks into the back of the van.

‘If anything happens, will you let us know?’ I handed him a business card.

He frowned, like he’d seen everything now. Smack dealers with business cards. I couldn’t think what to say. The more I protested the lamer it sounded. I stuffed the last bin liner into the van, and when I turned round Pants was already back in the house. The front door banged closed.

‘Don’t think he likes us,’ I said to Jo. She was crouched in the road by the driver’s door.

‘Whatevs,’ she said.

‘He thinks we’re dealers.’

‘Who cares what he thinks? He’s a bloke.’

Jo’s never been what you’d call a man’s woman and you can’t really blame her. When she was twelve, her dad ran off with her Girl Guide leader. He’s just had twins with his latest girlfriend, Stacey, who’s only three years older than Jo. Jo says he’s trying to be the Paul Weller of gastroenterology.

But lately she’s got worse. Five months ago, she caught her last boyfriend – Andy, the copper – in bed with the station typist, and since then she’s declared herself a political lesbian. Whether a political lesbian is the same as an actual lesbian, I’ve yet to discover, but Jo ranks men only a point or two higher than amoeba on the evolutionary scale.

I watched her trying to prise open the plastic cover on the inside of the driver’s door with a screwdriver. ‘What you doing?’

‘Trying to find somewhere to stash this. Case we get pulled.’

My discomfort grew. I wasn’t in a hurry to have anyone else suspect us of drug dealing, and particularly not the police. We drove back to the office in silence, the sky turning a dusky pink.

The offices felt safe, familiar. As soon as we’d carried all the bags inside, I locked the door and flicked the lights on. I made us a cup of tea while Jo quickly devised an inventory form on our second-hand PC. We sat in the front office, and Jo printed off a copy as I opened the first bin liner. Pants, or someone from the squat, had tied big knots in the top of each one, and it took me a few moments to prise it undone, the black plastic straining against my stubby fingernails.

‘Right, one thing at a time,’ said Jo. ‘Remember, this could be evidence.’

I paused. ‘Should we wear gloves?’

‘Shit, yes,’ said Jo, and I could tell she was pissed off she hadn’t thought of it. ‘I’ll run to Bobats.’

Bobats is the local hardware store. It’s open more or less twenty-four hours a day, and it sells everything from firelighters to lock cutters. I wasn’t sure it would sell gloves though; but sure enough less than five minutes later Jo was back with a box of disposable ones. We grinned at each other as we both pulled on a pair.

‘Remind you of anything?’

I shook thoughts of plastic speculums and wooden spatulas from my mind. ‘Probably should have thought before we handled a tin of heroin,’ I said.

Jo held the tip of her pen against the paper she’d attached to a plastic clipboard. ‘OK, what’ve we got?’

‘First up. A black jumper. Men’s.’ I looked at the label. ‘Marks & Spencer. Anarchy in the UK.’ I grinned. Jo didn’t respond. ‘Size: Large.’

Jo scribbled down the information.

‘Yeuch.’ I pulled out a pair of blue-grey underpants, glad of my latex. ‘Undies.’

That was all the first bag contained – clothes, and not all of them washed. The second one was a bit more interesting – a handful of textbooks, a biography of Bowie. A couple of ring-binder files with notes and hand-outs from the university sports psychology department and what looked like an advert dated May 2013 cut from the pages of the Manchester Evening News. ‘“Three Unforgettable Years. You will always be in my heart. Ciao. Roberto Mancini.”’ I turned it over. It had traces of Blu-Tack in the four corners. ‘Who’s he?’

‘Philistine,’ said Jo. ‘Manager at Man City, till he got sacked. Used to play for Italy.’

I put the advert to one side and carried on searching. At the bottom of the second bag I found a wallet containing an array of plastic cards – one for the National Union of Students complete with his photograph. I put that up on the desk as the photo was newer than the one we had. Also in the wallet were a couple of credit cards, past their expiry dates, and one that confirmed him as an organ donor. I tried not to see that as a sign. There were a couple of cardboard cards tucked in a pocket behind the leather – a library card and an out-of-date membership card for Alderley Edge Cricket Club. I guessed the wallet hadn’t been used for years. There was no money.

Jo continued checking the pockets in the heap of clothing in front of us. I’m not known for my colourful wardrobe, but it seemed Jack didn’t wear anything but black. She held up another pair of trousers, and a pair of underpants fell out of the leg. I shuddered. They say clothes maketh the man. If that’s the case, the man we were dealing with was shapeless, full of holes and had a bit of an issue with personal hygiene.

It wasn’t until the third bag that we discovered there was a whole lot more to Jack Wilkins.

Chapter Four

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.’