‘But so far she seems to have had an interest in Davy staying alive,’ I say. ‘Which is more than we can say for his co-founder at the agency. Or Bowling Ball.’
‘All right,’ says Em. ‘Oh, Elle, if you get a call from an unknown number, it’s probably Charli wanting to hire you as a private investigator. If you get flustered, just hand over to me.’
‘Em.’
‘I’m sorry. It was the only thing I could think of to keep her on the hook. We might need her again. All right, what next?’
Elle deals the index cards out onto her lap like a gambler with one pair. ‘Well. We could have another crack at Mr Wallace from Harcourt and Wallace, especially if he had a big row with Davy a few weeks ago. There’s these properties in the ledger, which we should check out. Plus the appointments, one tomorrow and one two days later, which we still haven’t cracked.’
‘215 Feathers and BB AGM.’
‘Exactly. And that’s about it.’
‘What about the daughter?’ I say.
‘Lulu?’
‘Yeah. I mean, if she inherits everything, that makes her a person of interest, doesn’t it?’
15
I like Brighton enormously, for a few reasons:
1) Hotbed of progressive housing policy. This would ordinarily be bad for me, as they’ve actually managed to fill quite a few homes, but:
2) Squat-friendly vibes. There are great stretches where you can’t walk fifty metres without inhaling the aroma of mung bean stew and strong lager. It’s either students or squatters, if not both.
3) The strongly liberal, anti-capitalist instincts of the general population have given them a pronounced prejudice against Amazon Ring devices and the like, meaning that the places I’ve established as my sort of house are still as interlope-able as ever they were. Finally:
4) Great cafés. You can’t beat that little warren of streets, whatever it’s called. The Arcades? The Follies? The Lanes, that’s it. Dull name. But you could go to a new place every hour and not run out for days.
I’m quite glad to be having a day out of London, given that Bowling Ball is still presumably interested in our whereabouts. We got the train out of Victoria (cash tickets), moved around the station separately to avoid attracting attention, and Jonny went full mask-and-hoodie to avoid the cameras. ‘Got to avoid the Thinkpol, man,’ he kept saying. I don’t know about Thinkpol, but I had to resist turning and fleeing when a standard, dozy, un-special constable ambled past me. Living as a murder suspect puts you on edge.
When I had a moment to myself on the train, I took another look at those two texts I got last night.I know who you really are, andWherever you are, you’re in deep, deep shit. Who would be interested in telling me they know who I am, trying to scare me that way? Could it be that Bowling Ball has worked out my identity? That’s likeliest, I suppose, but he doesn’t seem the type to play psychological games.
Something else happened on the train down, too. We were travelling in pairs, to avoid attracting attention. God knows if any of this stuff works. Presumably the police are looking for four people who look like us, and if they’ve managed to trace us – via the van, or via some other camera we didn’t clock – we’ll be caught as easily in two groups of two. I haven’t seen any more headlines about the murder, although I have beenon a bit of an involuntary news detox these last few days, so I haven’t really been paying attention.
I was sitting with Elle. I was actually relieved it fell that way. Jonny is a bit of a challenge to have a normal conversation with, and as for Em, I think she’s best in small doses. I like thunderstorms, but I wouldn’t like to live in the middle of one.
Anyway. This is how it went. I’m only making a big deal out of it because I never tell anyone about my early life. Maybe I was feeling a bit wobbly because of those weird texts, and the seamless transition I seemed to be making from ‘basically benign uninvited house-sitter’ to ‘murder suspect and future mob victim’.
The reason I never tell anyone is not that I’m a man of mystery or anything. It’s just that, under normal circumstances, nobodyasks. My closest interactions over the last several years have been with a) my colleagues at the photographic agency, who I see perhaps five times a year; b) a few hook-ups when I’m in Cornwall in the off season, and none of those girls seemed especially interested in finding out more about me; c) Tariq from the van hire place, and d) Ilya the glazier, who is one of my most reliable guys when I’ve broken a window in London in the course of a job. He travels anywhere inside Zone 6, he works for cash, and he has never once asked to see any ID, or proof that I am allowed to be in the fabulous homes I’ve called him out to. Until recently, I’d probably have said Ilya was my closest friend.
Put like that, it sounds a bit tragic, doesn’t it? Which itisn’t. It would only be tragic if I was in any way unhappy with that arrangement. But as it happens, I was content, always improving my skill set, and getting a lot of reading done to boot.
Anyway. We were on the train down, with our station coffees and our Nero snacks, and Elle said, ‘So, how did you get into all this in the first place?’
I’d known she was going to ask me, because – I think this is Elle’s superpower – she has a knack of getting information out of you, simply by directly requesting that information, tilting her head to one side and waiting. I had seen the tilt coming. What’s more, I had guessed for a couple of days that as the member of the group most interested in other people in general, Elle would be the one to ask. I thought about stonewalling, but something made me want to talk. So I finished my mouthful of flapjack, and began:
I didn’t ever know my birth parents. From what the institution intimated, I would never have known my father anyway; he was gone in roughly the time it took to put his trousers back on and write a fake number in my mother’s address book. There’s no question he’d done it before and would do it again. Occasionally I’ll see someone who looks a bit like me, not too far from my own age, and wonder if I’ve crossed paths with one of the half-siblings who must be out there.
My mother was young, in her early twenties, living in a beaten-up mining town up north that had been thoroughly Thatchered over the previous decade and never quite recovered. From what I’ve gathered, Mum wasn’t one of life’scopers. Remarkably, someone noticed before she did anything drastic like leaving me in a basket, and relieved her of me. I do wonder how bad it must have got for someone to have intervened, but those kinds of details weren’t made available to me, which is probably for the best.
So in lieu of any other relatives – my mum didn’t have much family of her own – it was off into the glorious carousel wheel of residential social care for me. This isn’t going to be a sob story, by the way, but it wasn’t especially enjoyable. I’ll spare you the details. It wasn’t likeOliver!, which is probably as close as most middle-class families get to the care system.
I got one very lucky break: Mr Eliot. In a pool of staff who were underpaid, under-slept, under-resourced and undermotivated, Mr Eliot was the one who taught us, or the willing ones among us, to read. Those of us who showed an interest he kept teaching, and kept providing with all the things we needed to carry on educating ourselves. He would do lessons in the morning. Even now I like the morning more than the afternoon.
If it wasn’t for him, I don’t know what I’d be doing now. I know what you’re thinking – what I’m doing now is hardly a noble calling. But I know it would be even worse if it wasn’t for Mr Eliot spotting some glimmer of curiosity or interest in me, and nurturing it. He brought in books for us – I think he paid for them himself. I visited him once, on a day out – well, I went to his home, anyway. Not to break in. He lived by himself, in an old terraced cottage in the rather tatty nearby village, and even from the other side of a rainy street I couldsee his place was crammed wall-to-wall with books. He was well-spoken too. I learned my accent from him, practised it at night. I never found out what his story was – disgraced teacher? Penitent banker? Simply a decent man trying to mend the world with broken tools? I suppose it doesn’t matter what the cause was. He saved me from a nothing life.
