Dead Like You

1998
38

Tuesday 6 January

‘Does it work?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, course it works. Wouldn’t be selling it otherwise, would I?’ He glared at the lean man in the brown boiler suit as if he had just insulted his integrity. ‘Everything in here works, mate, all right? If you want rubbish I can point you up the street. In here I only do quality. Everything works.’

‘It had better.’ He stared down at the white chest freezer that was tucked away between the upturned desks, swivel office chairs and upended settees at the rear of the vast second-hand furniture emporium in Brighton’s Lewes Road.

‘Money-back guarantee, all right? Thirty days, any problems, bring it back, no quibble.’

‘Fifty quid you’re asking?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What’s your trade price?’

‘Everything here’s trade price.’

‘Give you forty.’

‘Cash?

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Taking it away with you? I’m not delivering for that price.’

‘Gimme a hand out with it?’

‘That your van outside?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Better get a move on. There’s a warden coming.’

Five minutes later he jumped into the cab of the Transit, a few seconds ahead of the traffic warden, started the engine and drove it with a bump off the pavement and away from the double yellow lines. He heard the clang of his new purchase bouncing on the hessian matting on the otherwise bare metal floor behind him and moments later heard it sliding as he braked hard, catching up the congested traffic around the gyratory system.

He crawled passed Sainsbury’s, then made a left turn at the lights, up under the viaduct, and then on, heading towards Hove, towards his lock-up garage, where the young woman lay.

The young woman whose face stared out at him from the front page of the Argus, on every news-stand, beneath the caption HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON? Followed by her name, Rachael Ryan.

He nodded to himself. ‘Yes. Yep. I’ve seen her!’

I know where she is!

She is waiting for me!