The Disappeared

‘What’s the landlord going to say?’ said Jo as we stepped back into the main office and stared at the spray painting on the wall.

‘“Be scarred”?’

‘Think it means “scared”,’ said Jo.

They could fuck off. I wasn’t going to be scared. Or scarred. Not of sneaky cowards like this. Anyone can break in when there’s no one home.

‘Well,’ said Jo. ‘We’ve obviously rattled someone’s cage.’ She said this like it might be a good thing.

‘Come on,’ I said, the pain in my toes helping to focus my thoughts. ‘See if the kettle still works. I’ll make a start. Better add burglar alarm to the list.’

We had an office toolkit, basic, but we’d bought a hammer and nails to hang pictures, and a screwdriver to put up a set of flat-pack furniture. I found the hammer by the back door and with a bit of effort I managed to get one of the desks back into a vaguely usable condition, although I had to prop it up with the remains of the coffee table. The other desk was a write-off. Luckily, we hadn’t splashed out on anything state of the art.

Jo came back into the main room to report that the tea bags had been nicked, which added insult to injury. She turned her attention to bagging up Jack’s clothes. The furniture that was beyond repair, the green felt table from the back room and the office chairs, I smashed up into smaller pieces before collecting up the sticks of wood and building a small bonfire in the backyard. I swore as I worked that whoever had done this wasn’t going to get away with it.

The upstairs tenants returned from a night’s clubbing not long after two. They were wasted, but that made them so sympathetic I nearly cried. They kept hugging us, pupils wide as jammy dodgers, and one of them went up to their flat and returned with tea bags, milk and two new mugs. I swept the remains of our old crockery into the bin.

We all knew what it was like to be burgled, living in Leeds 6: LS6. No one even mentioned calling the police. We hadn’t got round to sorting out insurance, so there seemed little point in trying to get a crime reference number.

‘We should ring a locksmith,’ I said. ‘Oh, shit. They’ve nicked my phone.’

‘Lee.’ Jo put her hands on her hips.

‘It’s not my fault,’ I said. ‘I’m the victim of a crime.’

‘It’s twenty quid a month we pay for that phone. For the next two years.’

‘Lend me yours.’

‘No.’

‘Fine, I’ll use the landline.’

Jo held up the broken body of the telephone.

I was saved by one of the ravers. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got an old one my mam gave me,’ he said, and he scampered off, this time coming back with a white plastic phone with a built-in answer-machine.

‘Thanks,’ I said, fighting back the tears again. Any act of kindness was bringing me to my knees. I tried to get a grip by calling an emergency locksmith. He promised to be there within the hour.

After a while the upstairs lot left, promising to help us redecorate in the morning. I knew they’d be lucky to have come back to earth by then, but I said thanks anyway. They trotted off back to their upstairs flat, not seeming unduly concerned. Burglaries happen all the time in LS6.

But I knew better. This wasn’t a burglary. This was a warning.

Chapter Ten

We got the office as straight as we could and then went home. I didn’t sleep at all and by the time I heard Jo’s alarm clock go off on Saturday morning, I’d made a full set of notes, including a timeline that started with Jack’s Christmas visit to his parents, and ended with our burglary.

‘He must have started seeing Carly just before he stopped contacting his parents. And that’s another thing that doesn’t add up.’

‘Morning,’ said Jo, coming into the front room in her Snoopy pyjamas.

‘Mrs Wilkins said she hadn’t heard from him for three months, but he only disappeared a week ago.’

‘Tea?’

‘Why didn’t he contact his mother in all that time before?’

Jo yawned and stretched her arms. ‘We’re sticking with the theory she is his mother?’

‘Stepmother. If his real mum died when he was 5, it stands to reason his dad’s going to remarry. No man’s going to stay on his own all that time, not with a young kid to look after.’

Jo moved her head from side to side like she was trying to find the balance on a set of scales. ‘OK.’

‘So why didn’t he contact them in all that time?’

‘’Cause he had a new girlfriend? Too busy shagging to ring?’

‘I hate that word.’ I pulled on my Docs and tied the laces. ‘A new girlfriend doesn’t explain three months of not ringing. I’m thinking his drug-taking’s getting out of control.’

‘Did you get any sleep?’ asked Jo.

I knew there was a piece of the jigsaw we were missing. I couldn’t get the thought to properly form in my head. I had a list of questions – like why had Jack told Carly he loved her the night before he disappeared? Why had he left the cash behind? And why had he posted the smack to the squat and not the dealers it belonged to? If he owed them cash, why hadn’t he just paid them out of the money he’d left behind? And why hadn’t he taken his clothes? Or got in touch with Carly?

Next to each question I’d written as many possible answers as I could think of. They ranged from ‘because he didn’t know’ to ‘because he’s dead’. The money was the most puzzling thing of all, and I couldn’t help thinking that if I could find the answer to that, I’d be a whole heap closer to discovering what had happened. The only thing that made any sense was that either Jack had been taken away, against his will, or he didn’t know the cash was there. Perhaps the dealers had kidnapped him. But then who would pay up?

Jack’s letter, plus the fact that there hadn’t been a ransom demand, at least not one we knew about, suggested he hadn’t been kidnapped, so I was working on the second theory. Jack didn’t know the money was there. Which, of course, begged the questions: who would hide twenty-four grand in someone else’s socks? And why? One thing was certain, Brownie knew something.

‘Hello?’ said Jo. ‘Tea?’

We needed to go back to the beginning, and to me the beginning spells the nuclear. We’d met Jack’s mother, or at least someone who claimed to be his mother. Stood to reason we now needed to meet his dad. See what light he could shed. Was Jack’s mother dead? Was Mrs Wilkins really a stepmother? And if she was, what kind of stepmother? The kind her stepson confided in? I hoped so, for his sake. Because I know better than anyone, if you’ve lost your mother, and your dad’s an arse, you need someone on your side.

Mrs Wilkins said Jack’s dad had washed his hands of his son. I already knew what I thought of Mr Wilkins. ‘We’re going to speak to his dad,’ I said to Jo.

‘Thought you promised we wouldn’t?’

‘That was when Mrs Wilkins promised me she was his mother. And that she was staying at the Queens.’

‘Fair enough.’ I noticed Jo’s pyjama buttons were done up wrong. ‘How?’

‘She wrote down the address on the client contact form.’

‘Like that’s going to be right. Face it, Lee. Everything she’s told us has been a lie.’

‘I’ll google him.’

‘What? Mr Wilkins, Manchester?’

I pushed her in the direction of the door. ‘Get dressed. We need to get to the offices. She’s supposed to ring at nine. If she can’t get through on my mobile, she’ll ring the landline.’

Jo disappeared into the hall and came back a few moments later with a wooden rounders bat that she kept in the understairs cupboard. Not that she’d ever play rounders, but she’d read somewhere that if you beat up a burglar with something that you could reasonably be expected to have in the house, you wouldn’t get arrested. Fortunately, we’d never been called upon to test this theory. She swung it lightly, like she was warming up. ‘What about the dickheads that broke in last night?’

‘We’ll deal with them later.’

The offices were depressing but I didn’t intend to hang around too long. It was almost nine by the time I got there. Jo detoured via Bobats to buy padlocks and more bin liners. I didn’t want to miss Mrs Wilkins’s call. I was fairly certain Mrs Wilkins would ring; she’d been desperate the day before. That kind of desperation doesn’t go away.

Sure enough, at three minutes past nine, the phone the upstairs neighbours had given us trilled. I grabbed the receiver, but Jo got to the hands-free button before me.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi. It’s Susan. Susan Wilkins.’

I exhaled.

‘What news?’ she said. ‘Did you get into the squat?’

‘Where are you?’

‘My hotel.’

‘How is it at the Queens?’ asked Jo. ‘I hear the breakfasts are pretty good.’

‘Never mind that,’ said Mrs Wilkins. ‘How are you getting on?’

‘We’ve run into a couple of problems,’ Jo said, and I hated her for being so blunt, for not shying away from the truth.

‘Nothing serious,’ I lied, as I took a seat on the broken coffee table that was propping up the desk. ‘But there’s a few questions we need to ask.’

‘The main one being—’

I cut Jo off with one of my hard stares. I don’t do them much, so when I do, Jo takes notice. I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle.

‘What’s happened?’

I guessed what she was thinking. It’s obvious, if you’ve ever lost someone. You think the worst. You think about dead bodies, and possible suicides, cold canals, horrific car smashes. You think about the pictures you thought you’d never have to imagine, the headlines that used to read like fiction, things that would never happen to you. I wanted to reassure her, but I wasn’t sure I had the words.

‘You see, the thing is, Mrs Wilkins, we spoke to his girlfriend and she says—’

‘Carly?’

‘You know her?’

‘No. Not really.’

‘You know her name,’ I said.

‘He mentioned her, the last time I saw him.’

‘At Christmas,’ Jo said, her voice rising like she was checking a fact.

‘I wasn’t sure whether it would develop into anything serious. I assumed they’d split up. Does she know where he is?’

‘No. She hasn’t seen him. He was supposed to meet her, and he didn’t show up.’

‘Meet her where?’

Jo opened her mouth to answer, but I didn’t give her chance. Something about the whole situation was giving me the heebie-jeebies. ‘We can’t give out that kind of information. Not at this stage in the investigation. We’re eliminating people from our enquiries.’

She paused, and I heard her light a cigarette. ‘What did they say at the squat?’

‘Same. He disappeared last Friday – no one’s seen him since. Well, no one we’ve spoken to.’

‘He was good friends with someone in the squat. Brownie, I think he said. Have you spoken to him?’

I didn’t like the way she seemed to know more than she’d let on the day before – yesterday she knew nothing, now it was like she was directing us around our own investigation. I decided to grasp the nettle. ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you a couple more questions.’

‘Like?’

I inhaled. There was no polite way to put this. ‘His girlfriend, Carly, is under the impression that Jack’s mother, well, that Jack’s mother passed over.’ I know, don’t ask me why – I’ve never said ‘passed over’ in my whole life before. ‘When he was 5.’

Mrs Wilkins muttered something that sounded to my ears like: ‘Never talks about it.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Just, obviously they’re very close.’

‘So,’ I said, when it became obvious she wasn’t going to volunteer any information. ‘Do you know why she might have said that?’

‘I do.’

Another silence that seemed to stretch into the distance. ‘Why did you tell us that you’re—’

‘Jack’s stepmother. I married his father after his mother died.’ She cleared her throat. ‘He was heartbroken. Still is. It’s taken years for him to come to terms with it. She was an amazing woman.’

‘Must be hard. To match up to a dead, amazing woman,’ said Jo, pulling a face at me as she spoke into the phone.

‘I don’t look at it like that,’ came back Mrs Wilkin’s voice. ‘I feel grateful to her.’ Jo stuck two fingers down her throat and pretended to vomit. I don’t know whether Mrs Wilkins had an inkling of what was going on in our offices, but her next sentence seemed pointed and directed at Jo. ‘Women shouldn’t be in competition with each other. If more women—’

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ interrupted Jo.

‘Didn’t seem relevant,’ she said, and I heard her light another cigarette. ‘To all intents and purposes, I am Jack’s mother. He’s a lost soul, was a lost soul, when I met him. Haunted, really.’

‘You got any other children?’

‘Am I under investigation in my own investigation?’

There was ice in her voice and an awkward pause as Jo and I glanced at each other.

I flinched first. ‘It’s just the more background we have, the better and the quicker we’ll find him. Has Jack got any siblings?’

‘Have you managed to find out anything? Besides he’s got a girlfriend?’

Jo and I had rehearsed this on our way down to the office that morning. How much to tell.

‘He’s moved out of the squat,’ I said. ‘And he didn’t leave a forwarding address.’

‘And he hasn’t been into work to collect his wages,’ Jo added. ‘No one’s seen him for a week.’

‘We were wondering whether we should go to the police,’ I said.

‘I hire a team of private investigators and your first idea is to go to the police?’

I screwed up my courage. ‘We’re worried something may have happened to him. Something, you know, something bad.’ I prayed Jo wouldn’t revisit the list of possible catastrophes.

‘No.’ Mrs Wilkins’s voice was firm down the phone. ‘No, I’d know if something, something like that had happened to him. I don’t want the police involved, not until I know what this is about.’

I glanced at Jo. Neither of us had been particularly keen on the police idea. We’d always seen them as the enemy, the hard black line on demonstrations, the invisible tail on stoned car journeys, the possible tap on the line as we ordered our recreational drugs. And, of course, after what happened with Andy. Well, let’s just say it’s hard to contemplate the idea of voluntarily involving them in our lives.

‘Did his flatmates say anything about where he might be?’

‘Not really.’ We’d decided not to mention the letter. Or the drugs. ‘He did a moonlight flit.’

‘What about Brownie then? Have you spoken to him?’

‘We’ve still more interviews to do,’ said Jo.

‘What’s the plan?’

Interesting question, and at that point I couldn’t put into words the sense of unease that was hanging around my shoulders like a cloak. I knew she wouldn’t be that chuffed if we told her our next move was to track down her husband. I knew she had a very clear idea as to how we should run the investigation and poking around, testing the edges of her story, wasn’t it.

‘We need a phone number,’ I said. ‘We need to be able to contact you. We’re out and about for the rest of the day.’

‘Where?’

‘Following up some enquiries on the girlfriend,’ I said.

‘What enquiries?’

That was as far as I’d got. ‘She’s from Huddersfield,’ I improvised. ‘Her parents might be hiding Jack.’

‘I want an address,’ Mrs Wilkins barked down the phone. A pause. Her tone softened. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a difficult time.’

I could feel the tension emanating from her down the telephone line. I raised my eyebrows at Jo. ‘We’ll get back to you as soon as we have something concrete. But we need a number.’

‘What happened to your offices?’

‘Ah.’ I fingered the telephone wire. ‘You’ve been?’

‘The front door is boarded up.’

‘We’re having some work done.’

‘You’ve been burgled. Who by?’

‘Kids. It’s a crime-ridden area. It’s nothing—’

‘What did they take?’

‘Nothing. There’s nothing to take. We have a security system. Nothing of any value is left in the office.’

‘The place looked trashed.’

‘Just kids—’

‘This isn’t happening fast enough,’ she said.

‘Give us a chance.’ I know I sounded petulant. ‘We only started yesterday. We’re making progress,’ I said as I crossed my fingers behind my back. ‘These things don’t solve themselves overnight.’

‘I can’t stay here,’ she said.

‘Where’s here?’ I asked at the same time as Jo said: ‘We went down to the Queens.’

A barely perceptible pause. ‘I had to move,’ she said. ‘I think …’ her voice trailed off and for a moment I suspected that she was holding her hand over the receiver and talking to someone else. When she returned to the phone call, she spoke slower. ‘I think someone’s following me. I’m frightened Jack’s involved in something, something bad.’

‘Who would—?’

‘I’ll give you a number. Got a pen?’

Jo pulled one out of the front pocket of her dungarees, and I took down the number that Mrs Wilkins repeated twice.

‘Ring me on that, two o’clock. I’ve got to go.’

The dial tone sounded before I had chance to say goodbye.

‘Did you buy that?’ I asked Jo.

‘What, that about her being his adopted mother?’

‘Step,’ I said. These distinctions have always mattered to me.

‘She sounded worried,’ said Jo. ‘Why’d you tell her Carly’s parents might be hiding Jack?’

‘She sounded stressed,’ I said, refusing to recognize Jo’s look of bewilderment. I glanced at the biro marks on my left forearm. ‘Why would anyone be following her?’

‘You made it sound like we’d produce her son in time for lunch.’

‘I had to tell her something.’

‘We’ve got more chance of finding Madeleine McCann.’

‘You don’t know that. His dad might know something.’

I wasn’t convinced. All we were beginning to discover was how little we actually knew.

The next thing was to see if I could get the number for Mr Wilkins. I knew this was going to get us into deep trouble with our own client, but I needed some facts confirmed.

‘Where’s the form?’

The filing system, such as we’d had, had been three lever arch files that stood on top of the cupboard that housed the electricity metre. All those files had been torn apart and discarded in the middle of the room and then I’d bagged their ripped contents into bin liners as part of the tidy up process the night before. ‘Bollocks.’

I prised open the knot of one of the bin bags, the one that crunched, and sifted through the papers in there, but I couldn’t find the form.

‘It’s not here.’ I upended the only other bin liners that contained paper. The rest were full of the remains of Jack’s stuff.

Jo came over to help me search and we went wordlessly through the papers, now strewn all over the floor, one more time. And guess what? It wasn’t there. There wasn’t a single piece of it in evidence.

‘That’s weird. They wouldn’t take the form, would they?’

‘They might. Whoever burgled the office is looking for Jack. Maybe they’re on their way round to his dad’s house too.’

‘Give me your phone.’

Jo passed it across, and I googled ‘Wilkins + Manchester’: 800,000 results. The first twenty or so pages were about Ray Wilkins, a defender for Manchester United. Apparently.

‘This is hopeless. We’ll have to go there.’

‘Where?’ said Jo.

‘Manchester.’

‘Why Manchester?’

‘Mrs Wilkins said she was from Manchester.’

‘Only we can’t believe a fucking word she tells us,’ said Jo.

‘Didn’t Carly say he was a car salesman?’ I added ‘cars’ to the search bar, which narrowed the results to a mere 65,000.

I stared at what remained of Jack’s possessions, scattered on the floor. ‘The thing from Mancini – he’s a Man City fan.’

‘There’s people living in Japan that support Man City.’

‘You’re forgetting our clue.’ I pounced on the wallet.

Jo stared at me. ‘We have a clue?’

I opened it up and rang a finger through the various pockets. Nothing there. I rummaged through the papers on the floor. ‘Jesus, that’s gone as well.’

Jo’s forehead scrunched. ‘His blood donor card?’

‘The membership card – remember? Here it is!’ I pounced on the small rectangular piece of cardboard among the debris. ‘Alderley Edge Cricket Club. Junior member.’

‘Junior member?’

‘It’s expired. But that’s where he’s from. Bet you.’

‘Alderley Edge? Was that where Beckham lived?’

‘Google it,’ I said, chucking her phone back at her.

Jo tapped the screen. ‘“Alderley Edge”,’ she read. ‘“A village and civil parish in Cheshire – fourteen miles south of Manchester”.’

‘Carly said a village.’ We were on the right track, I could feel it.

Jo frowned. ‘So we’re going to drive around Alderley Edge looking for Jack’s dad?’

‘He’s got a car dealership. He wants people to find him.’

‘You don’t know his business is in Alderley Edge.’

‘Any better ideas?’

Jo pulled a face. ‘We should tidy this lot away again.’

‘Let’s just get there.’

‘Wild fecking goose chase.’

‘Worth a shot,’ I said.

While Jo scooped the crap back into the bin liners, I paced the office, stopping only to scribble a few more questions on my notepad. Even if we didn’t find Jack’s dad, I wanted to see a bit of where Jack was from, get some of the background – and not just through the eyes of his stepmother. What does a stepmother know? Even assuming Susan Wilkins was who she said she was.

One fact remained. Jack had done a runner and I suppose the thought was in my mind that he might have gone home. We reach for the past in times of trouble, it’s instinctive. The same way I still think about my mother anytime there’s a success or a failure. No matter she’s been dead four years. No matter that even when she was alive, she’d be too wrapped up in her own misery to take any notice of me, or my life. It’s in all our bones. We want someone to share the highs and lows with.

We were on the road less than twenty minutes later. Jo stashed the rounders bat on the back seat and then climbed behind the steering wheel. I can drive, but I’m not a natural. I’m more your wing pilot – roll cigarettes, read maps, watch out for signs, that kind of thing.

The clock on the dashboard said twenty to eleven as we arrived in Alderley Edge. It was the first day of the year that felt like it had any warmth to it, and I felt like I was coming out of hibernation – like I was waking up. It was obvious, we needed to come to the beginning to work out what had happened at the end.

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