Lost

11

I have been sitting in silence in an interview room, having finished my tea and eaten the ginger-nut biscuits. The room smells of fear and loathing. Maybe it's me.

Given a choice, Campbell would have had me arrested. Instead he wants me taken back to the hospital because he can't guarantee my safety. In reality, he wants me out of the way.

Almost instinctively my fingers find the morphine capsules. My leg is hurting again but maybe it's my pride. I don't want to think about anything for a while. I want to forget and float away. Amnesia isn't such a bad thing.

This is where I interviewed Howard Wavell for the first time. He had been holed up in his flat for three days with people buzzing on the intercom and the media camped outside. Most people would have disappeared by then—gone to stay with friends or family—but Howard wouldn't risk bringing the circus with him.

I remember him standing at the front counter, arguing with the desk sergeant. He rocked from one foot to the other, glancing over his shoulder. The short sleeves of his shirt stretched tight over his biceps and the buttons pulled across his stomach.

“They put dog shit through my mailbox,” he said, incredulously. “And someone threw eggs at my windows. You have to stop them.”

The desk sergeant regarded him with an exhausted authority. “Are you reporting a crime, Sir?”

“I'm being threatened.”

“And who exactly is threatening you?”

“Vigilantes! Vandals!”

The sergeant pulled an incident pad from beneath the counter and slid it across the bench top. Then he took a cheap pen and placed it on the pad. “Write it down.”

Howard looked almost relieved when I made an appearance.

“They attacked my flat.”

“I'm sorry. I'll send someone over to stand guard. Why don't you come and sit down.”

He followed me along the corridor to the interview room and I pulled his chair nearer to the air-conditioning unit, offering him a bottle of water.

“I'm glad you're here. We haven't really had a chance to catch up. It's been a long time.”

“I guess,” he said, sipping at the water.

Acting like we were old friends I started reminiscing about school and some of the teachers. With a little prompting, Howard added his own stories. There is a theory about interrogations that once suspects begin talking easily about any particular topic it is harder for them to stop talking about other topics that you raise or for them to suddenly start lying.

“So tell me, Howard, what do you think happened to Mickey Carlyle? You must have given it some thought. Everyone else seems to be trying to figure it out. Do you think she just walked out of the front door without anyone seeing her or was she abducted? Maybe you think aliens whisked her away. I've heard every bizarre theory you can imagine over the past seven days.”

Howard frowned and moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. A pigeon landed on the ledge outside, beside the air-conditioning unit. Howard gazed at the bird as though it might have brought him a message.

“At first I thought she might just be hiding, you know. She used to like hiding under the stairs and playing in the boiler room. That's what I thought last week but well, now, I don't know. Maybe she went to sell cookies or something.”

“There's a possibility I hadn't considered.”

“I didn't mean to sound flippant,” he said clumsily. “That's how I first met her. She knocked on my door selling Girl Scout cookies—only she wasn't wearing a uniform and the cookies were homemade.”

“Did you buy any?”

“Nobody else was going to—they were burned to a crisp.”

“So why did you?”

He shrugged. “She showed a bit of initiative. I got nieces and nephews . . .” The statement tailed off.

“I thought you might have a sweet tooth. Sugar and spice and all things nice, eh?”

A wave of pale pink shaded his cheeks and his neck muscles tightened. He couldn't tell if I was inferring something.

Changing focus, I took him back to the beginning, asking him to explain his movements in the hours before and after Mickey disappeared. His blinds had been drawn that Monday morning. None of his workmates saw him mowing the covered reservoir at Primrose Hill. At one o'clock the police searched his flat. He didn't go back to work. Instead he spent the afternoon outside, taking photographs.

“You didn't go to work on Tuesday morning?”

“No. I wanted to do something to help. I printed up a photograph of Mickey to put on a flyer.”

“In your darkroom?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do after that?”

“I did some washing.”

“This is Tuesday morning, right? Everyone else is out searching and you're doing your laundry.”

He nodded uncertainly.

“There used to be a rug on the floor in your sitting room.” I showed him a photograph—one of his own. “Where is this rug now?”

“I threw it away.”

“Why?”

“It was dirty. I couldn't get it clean.”

“Why was it dirty?”

“I spilled some potting compost on it. I was making hanging baskets.”

“When did you throw it away?”

“I don't remember.”

“Was it after Mickey disappeared?”

“I think so. Maybe.”

“Where did you throw it?”

“In a Dumpster off the Edgware Road.”

“You couldn't find one closer?”

“Dumpsters get filled up.”

“But you work for the council. There must have been dozens of trash cans you could have used.”

“I . . . I didn't think . . .”

“You see how it looks, Howard. You cleaned up your flat, you took out the rug, the place smelled of bleach—it looks like you might be hiding something.”

“No, I just cleaned up a bit. I wanted the flat to look nice.”

“Nice?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever seen these before, Howard?” I held up a pair of girl's panties enclosed in a plastic evidence bag. “They were found in your laundry bag.”

His voice tightened. “They belong to one of my nieces. They stay with me all the time—my nieces and nephews . . .”

“Do they sleep over?”

“In my spare room.”

“Has Mickey Carlyle ever been in your spare room?”

“Yes. No. Maybe.”

“Do you know Mrs. Carlyle very well?”

“Only to say hello when I see her on the stairs.”

“She a good mother?”

“I guess.”

“A good-looking woman.”

“She's not really my type.”

“Why's that?”

“She's kind of abrupt, you know, not very friendly. Don't tell her I said that; I don't want to hurt her feelings.”

“And you prefer?”

“Um, you know, it's not a sexual thing. I don't know really. Hard to say.”

“You got a girlfriend, Howard?”

“Not just now.”

He made it sound like he had one for breakfast with his coffee.

“Tell me about Danielle.”

“I don't know any Danielle.”

“You have photographs of a girl called Danielle—on your computer. She's wearing bikini bottoms.”

He blinked once, twice, three times. “She's the daughter of a former girlfriend.”

“She's not wearing a top. How old is she?”

“Eleven.”

“There's another girl pictured with a towel over her head, lying on a bed. She's only wearing a pair of shorts. Who is she?”

He hesitated. “Mickey and Sarah were playing a game. They were putting on a play. It was just a bit of fun.”

“Yeah, that's what I figured.” I smiled reassuringly.

Howard's hair was plastered to his head and every so often a drop of perspiration leaked into his eyes, making him blink. Opening a large yellow envelope, I pulled out a bundle of photographs and started laying them out side by side, row after row. They were all shots of Mickey—two hundred and seventy of them—pictures of her sunbathing in the garden with Sarah, others of them playing under a sprinkler, eating ice-cream cones and wrestling on his couch.

“They're just photographs,” he said defensively. “She was very photogenic.”

“You said ‘was,' Howard. Like you don't think she's still alive.”

“I didn't mean . . . you're . . . you're trying to make out I'm . . . I'm . . . a . . .”

“You take pictures, Howard, it's obvious. Some of these are very good. You're also in the church choir and you're an altar boy.”

“An altar server.”

“And you teach Sunday school.”

“I help out.”

“By taking kids away on day trips—to the beach or to the zoo?”

“Yes.”

I made him look closely at a photograph. “She doesn't look very comfortable posing in a bikini, does she?” I put another photograph in front of him . . . then another.

“It was just a bit of fun.”

“Where did she get changed?”

“In the spare room.”

“Did you take photographs of her getting changed?”

“No.”

“Did Mickey ever stay overnight with you?”

“No.”

“Did you ever leave her alone in your flat?”

“No.”

“And you wouldn't take her outside without permission.”

“No.”

“You didn't take her to the zoo or for any day trips?”

He shook his head.

“That's good. I mean, it would have been negligent, wouldn't it, to leave such a young child alone or to let her play with photographic chemicals or with sharp implements?”

He nodded.

“And if she cut herself you might have to explain this to her mother. I'm sure Mrs. Carlyle would understand. Accidents happen. Then again, you wouldn't want her getting angry and stopping Mickey from seeing you. So maybe you wouldn't tell her. Maybe you'd keep it a secret.”

“No, I'd tell her.”

“Of course you would. If Mickey cut herself, you'd have to tell her mother.”

“Yes.”

I picked up a blue folder and slid a sheet into view, running my finger down several paragraphs and then tapping it thoughtfully with my index finger.

“That's very good, Howard, but I'm puzzled. You see we found traces of Mickey's blood on your sitting-room floor as well as in the bathroom and on one of your towels.”

Howard's jaw flapped up and down and his voice grew strident. “You think I did something—but I didn't.”

“So tell me about the blood.”

“She cut her finger. She and Sarah were making a tin-can phone but one of the cans had a sharp edge. I should have checked it first. It wasn't a deep cut. I put a Band-Aid on it. She was very brave. She didn't cry . . .”

“And did you tell her mother?”

He looked down at his hands. “I told Mickey not to. I was scared Mrs. Carlyle might stop her coming over if she thought I was negligent.”

“There was too much blood for a cut finger. You tried to clean it all up but the rug was too stained. That's why you threw it away.”

“No, not blood. Soil from the hanging baskets—I spilled some.”

“Soil?”

He nodded enthusiastically.

“You said you never took Mickey on an excursion. We found fibers from her clothes in your van.”

“No. No.”

I let the silence stretch out. Howard's eyes were filled with a mixture of fear and regret. Suddenly, he surprised me by speaking first. “You remember Mrs. Castle . . . from school? She used to take us for ballroom dancing lessons.”

I remembered her. She looked like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (after she left the convent) and featured in every fifth-form boy's wet dreams except perhaps for Nigel Bryant and Richard Coyle who batted for the other side.

“What about her?”

“I once saw her in the shower.”

“Getaway!”

“No, it's true. She was using the dean's shower and old Archie” (the sports master) “sent me to pick up a starter pistol from the staff quarters. She came out of the shower drying her hair and didn't see me until it was too late. She let me look. She stood there and let me watch her drying her breasts and pulling on her tights. Afterward she made me promise not to tell anyone. I would have been the most famous kid at school. All I had to do was tell that story. I could have saved myself a dozen beatings and all those taunts and jibes. I could have been a legend.”

“So why didn't you?”

He looked at me sadly. “I was in love with her. And it didn't matter that she wasn't in love with me. I loved her. It was my love story. I don't expect you to understand that but it's true. You don't have to be loved back. You can love anyway.”

“What does this have to do with Mickey?”

“I loved Mickey, too. I would never have hurt her . . . not on purpose.”

His pale green eyes were filled with tears. When he couldn't blink them away he wiped them with his hands. I felt sorry for him. I always did.

“It's important that you listen to me right now, Howard. I'll let you talk later.” I pulled my chair closer so that we were sitting knee to knee. “You're a middle-aged guy, never married, living alone, spending all his spare time with children, taking pictures of them, giving them ice-cream cones, taking them on outings . . .”

His cheeks darkened but his lips stayed white and narrow. “I have nieces and nephews. I take pictures of them, too. There's nothing wrong with that.”

“And you collect kiddie clothing catalogs and magazines?”

“It's not against the law. They're not pornographic. I want to be a photographer, a children's photographer . . .”

Getting to my feet I moved behind him. “Here's the thing I can't understand, Howard. What do you see in little girls? No hips, no breasts, no experience. They're straight up and down. I can understand the sugar and spice and all things nice stuff—girls smell nicer than boys, but Mickey had no curves. The adolescent good fairy hadn't sprinkled that magic dust in her eyes that made her eyelids flutter and her body develop. What do you see in little girls?”

“They're innocent.”

“And you want to take that away from them?”

“No. Never.”

“You want to hold them . . . to touch them.”

“Not like that. Not in a dirty way.”

“Mickey must have laughed at you. The creepy old guy across the hall.”

Louder this time: “I never touched her!”

“Do you remember To Kill a Mockingbird?”

He paused, looking at me curiously.

“Boo Radley was the scary guy who lived in the basement across the road. All the kids were frightened of him. They threw stones on his roof and dared each other to go into his yard. But in the end it's Boo Radley who saves Scout and Jem from the real villain. He becomes the hero. Is that what you were waiting for, Howard—to rescue Mickey?”

“You don't know me. You don't know anything about me.”

“Oh, yes I do. I know exactly what you are. There's a name for people like you: grooming pedophiles. You pick out your victims. You isolate them. You befriend their parents. You slowly work your way into their lives until they trust you—”

“No.”

“What did you do with Mickey?”

“Nothing. I didn't touch her.”

“But you wanted to.”

“I just took pictures. I would never hurt her.”

He was about to say something else but I raised my hand and stopped him.

“I know you're not the sort of guy who would have planned to hurt her. You're not like that. But sometimes accidents happen. They aren't planned. They get out of hand . . . you saw her that day.”

“No. I didn't touch her.”

“We found her fingerprints and fibers from her clothes.”

He kept shaking his head.

“They were in your van, Howard. They were in your bedroom.”

Reaching over his shoulder, I jabbed my finger at each of the different girls in his photographs.

“We're going to find your ‘models,' Howard, this one and this one and this one. And we're going to ask these girls what you did to them. We're going to find out if you touched them and if you took any other sorts of photographs.”

My voice had grown low and harsh. I leaned against him, shoulder to shoulder, forcing him sideways off his chair. “I'm not leaving you alone, Howard. We're in this together—like Siamese twins, joined at the hip, but not up here.” I tapped my head. “Help me understand.”

He turned slowly toward me, searching my eyes for sympathy. Then suddenly, he toppled backward, scurrying to the corner of the room where he crouched, covering his head with his arms.

“DON'T HIT ME! DON'T HIT ME!” he screamed. “I'll tell you what you want—”

“What are you doing?” I hissed.

“NOT MY FACE, DON'T HURT MY FACE.”

“Stand up! Cut this out!”

“PLEASE . . . NOT AGAIN . . . AAAARGH!”

I opened the door and called for two uniforms. They were already coming down the corridor.

“Pick him up. Make him sit in his chair.”

Howard went limp. It was like trying to pick up spilled jelly. Each time they tried to lift him onto a chair he slid to the floor, quivering and moaning. The uniforms looked at each other and back to me. I knew what they were thinking.

Finally we left him there, lying beneath the table. I turned back in the doorway. I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell him that it was just the beginning.

“You can't bully me,” he said softly. “I'm an expert. I've been bullied all my life.”

Sitting in the same interview room, three years on, it's still not over. My cell phone is ringing.

The Professor sounds relieved. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, but I need you to come and get me. They want to send me back to the hospital.”

“Maybe it's a good idea.”

“Are you going to help me or not?”

Shifts are changing at the station. The evening crews are coming on watch. Campbell is somewhere upstairs, shuffling paper or whatever else justifies his salary. Slipping along the corridor past the charge room, I reach a door to the rear parking lot. A blast of cold wind ushers me outside.

Gears on the electric gate grind into motion. Hiding in the shadows, I watch an ambulance pull through the opening. It's coming to pick me up. The gates are shutting again. At the last possible moment I step through the closing gap. Turning right, I follow the pavement and turn right twice more until I'm back on the Harrow Road. Slow lines of traffic puncture the darkness.

There's a pub called the Greyhound on the Harrow Road—a smoky, nicotine-stained place with a jukebox and a resident drunk in the corner. I take a table and a morphine capsule. By the time the Professor arrives I'm floating on a chemical cloud. The Greeks had a god called Morpheus—the god of dreams. Who said studying the classics was a waste of time?

Joe pokes his head through the door and looks around nervously. Maybe he's forgotten how authentic pubs used to look before the Continental café culture turned them into white-tiled waiting rooms serving overpriced cooking lager.

“Have you taken something?”

“My leg was hurting.”

“How much are you taking?”

“Not enough.”

He waits for a better explanation.

“I started on about two hundred milligrams but lately I've been popping them like Tic Tacs. The pain won't go away. I function better if I don't have to think about the pain.”

“The pain?” He doesn't believe me. “You're a mess! You're jumpy and anxious. You're not eating or sleeping.”

“I'm fine.”

“You need help.”

“No! I need to find Rachel Carlyle.”

The statement is harsh and abrupt. Joe swallows some uneasy thoughts and drops the subject. Instead, I tell him about visiting Howard and arresting Aleksei Kuznet. He looks at me in disbelief.

“He wouldn't tell me about the ransom.”

“What ransom?”

Joe doesn't know about the diamonds and I'm not going to tell him. It won't add to his understanding and I've already put Ali in danger. Nothing has become any clearer in the past few hours but at least I have a goal—to find Rachel.

“How did Aleksei find you?”

“I don't know. He didn't follow me from the hospital and nobody knew I was going to Wormwood Scrubs. Maybe someone called him from the prison.”

I close my eyes and replay events. I'm totally flying but can still think straight. Snatches of conversation drift back to me.

“God is going to set me free.” That's what Howard said.

If Howard sent the ransom demand why did he wait so long? He could have set up a hoax during his trial or at any stage since then. He would have needed help from the outside. Who?

The Home Office keeps a record of all visitors to Her Majesty's prisons. Howard's eldest sister visits him every few months, traveling down from Warrington and staying overnight at a local B & B. Apart from her there's only been Rachel.

In the first few months after his conviction he received bundles of fan mail. Many of the letters were from women who fell in love with his lonely countenance and his crime. One of them, Bettina Gallagher, a legal secretary from Cardiff, is a notorious pinup among the lifers. She sends pornographic photographs of herself and has twice been engaged to death row inmates in Alabama and Oklahoma.

Howard is allowed one free postage-paid letter a week but can buy more stationery and stamps from the prison shop. Each prisoner is also given a unique PIN number he must use when using the telephone. Pedophiles and child molesters can dial only approved numbers. Letters and calls are monitored.

These details rattle in the emptiness. I can't see Howard arranging a ransom drop—not from inside a prison cell.

“Give your eyes a chance,” my stepfather used to say when we were looking for newborn lambs on frosty nights. White on white is difficult to see. Sometimes you have to look past things before you really see them.

There used to be a really good comedian who called himself Nosmo King. I watched this guy for years and didn't realize where the name came from. NO SMOKING. Nosmo King. That's why you have to keep your eyes open. The answer can be right in front of you.

The Professor has opened his briefcase and pulled out a photograph album. The cover is frayed and silverfish have given it a mottled finish along the spine. I recognize it from somewhere.

“I went to see your mother,” he says.

“You did what!”

“I went to see her.”

My teeth are clenched. “You had no right.”

Ignoring me, he runs his fingers over the album cover. Here it comes—the search backward, the probing of my childhood, my family and my relationships. What does it prove? Nothing. How can another human being have any appreciation of my life and the things that shaped me?

“You don't want to talk about this.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because you're poking your nose into my business—you're screwing with my head.”

It takes me a moment to realize that I'm shouting at him. Thankfully, there's nobody around except the barman and the sleeping drunk.

“She doesn't seem very happy in the nursing home.”

“It's a fucking retirement village.”

He opens the album. The first photograph is of my stepfather, John Francis Ruiz. A farmer's son from Lancashire, he's dressed in his RAF uniform, standing on the wing of a Lancaster bomber. Already losing his hair, his high forehead makes his eyes seem bigger and more alive.

I remember that photograph. For twenty years it stood on the mantelpiece beside a silver jubilee picture frame and one of those tacky snowballs of St. Paul's Cathedral.

John Ruiz went missing over Belgium on July 15, 1943, while on his way to bomb a bridge in Ghent. The Lancaster was hit by German fighters and exploded in midair, dropping like a fiery comet.

“Missing in action. Presumed dead,” the telegram said. Only he wasn't dead. He survived a German POW camp and came home to discover that the “future” he had fought so hard to protect had run off and married an American catering corps sergeant and moved to Texas. Nobody blamed her, least of all him.

And then he met Sofia Eisner (or Germile Purrum), a “Jewish” seamstress with a newborn son. She was striding down the hill from Golders Green, between two young friends, their arms locked together, laughing.

“Don't forget now,” shouted the eldest of them. “We're going to meet the men we're going to marry tonight.”

At the cinema at the bottom of the hill they came across a group of young men waiting in the queue. One of them wore a single-breasted jacket with notched lapels and three buttons.

Germile whispered to her friends, “Which one's mine?”

John Ruiz smiled at her. A year later they were married.

Joe turns another page of the album. The sepia images seem to have soaked into the paper. There is a photograph of the farm—a plowman's cottage with small leadlight windows and doors so low my stepfather had to duck his head to get through them. My mother filled the rooms with bric-a-brac and souvenirs, managing to convince herself they were heirlooms of her vanished family.

Outside the plowed fields were milk-chocolate brown and smoke fluttered like a ragged white flag from the chimney. In late summer wheels of hay dotted the hillsides like spilled lozenges.

I can still smell the mornings sometimes—the burned toast, strong tea and the talcum powder my stepfather sprinkled between his toes before pulling on his socks. As he closed the door the dogs barking excitedly, dancing around his feet.

I learned all about life and death on the farm. I snipped the scrotums of newborn lambs and pulled out the testes with my teeth. I put my forearm deep in a mare, feeling for the dilation of the cervix. I killed calves for the freezer and buried dogs that were more like siblings than working animals.

There aren't any photographs of everyday workings on the farm. The album records only special occasions—weddings, births, christenings and anniversaries.

“Who's this?” Joe points to a picture of Luke, who is wearing a sailor's suit and sitting on the front stairs. His blond cowlick stands up like a flag fall on an old-fashioned taxicab meter.

The lump forming in my throat feels like a tumor. Covering my mouth with my fingers, I try to stop the alcohol and morphine from talking but words leak out through my open pores.

Luke was always small for his age but he compensated for it by being loud and annoying. Most of the time I was at boarding school so I only saw him during the holidays. Daj would tell me to keep an eye on him and at the same time she'd tell Luke to stop bugging me because he constantly wanted to play Old Maid and to look at my football cards.

In the depths of winter when it snowed I used to go tobogganing down Hill Field, starting off near the front door and finishing at the pond. Luke was too young so he rode on a toboggan with me. Several hillocks along the way would throw us in the air and he squealed with laughter, clinging to my knees.

The track leveled off toward the end and a mesh fence sagged between posts having been hit so many times by braced feet.

My stepfather had gone into town to get a thermostat for the boiler. Daj was trying to hand dye my bedsheets a darker color to hide the semen stains. I can't remember what I was doing. Isn't that strange? I can remember every other detail with the clarity of a home movie.

At bath time we noticed him missing. We used a spotlight powered by the tractor engine to search the pond but the hole in the ice had closed over.

I lay awake that night, trying to will Luke into being. I wanted him to be lying in his bed, snuffling in his sleep and twitching like a dog dreaming of fleas.

They found him in the morning beneath the ice. His face was blue, his lips bluer. He was wearing hand-me-down trousers and hand-me-down shoes.

I watched from my bedroom window as they laid him on a sheet and tucked another beneath his chin. The ambulance had mud-streaked arches and open doors. As they lifted the stretcher I went flying out of the front door, screaming at them to leave my brother alone. My stepfather caught me at the gate. He picked me up and hugged me so hard I could barely breathe. His face was gray and prickly. His eyes were blurred with tears.

“He's gone, Vince.”

“I want him back.”

“We've lost him.”

“Let me see.”

“Go back inside.”

“Let me see.”

His chin was pressing into my hair. Daj had fallen to her knees beside Luke. She screamed and rocked back and forth, rubbing her fingers through his hair and kissing his closed lids.

She would hate me now. I knew that. She would hate me forever. It was my fault. I should have been looking after him. I should have helped him count his football cards and played his childish games. Nobody ever blamed me; nobody except me. I knew the truth. It had been my fault. I was responsible.

“We lost him,” my stepfather had said.

Lost? You lose something down the back of the sofa or through a hole in your pocket; you lose your train of thought or you lose track of time. You don't lose a child.

I wipe the wetness from my eyes and look at the Professor. I've been talking all this time. Why did he start me on this? What does he know about guilt? He doesn't have to look at it every day in the mirror or scrape whiskers off its soapy skin or see it reflected in his mother's eyes. I turned Daj into an alcoholic. She drank with the ghosts of her dead family and her dead son. She drank until her hands shook and her world smeared like lipstick on the edge of a glass. Alcoholics don't have relationships—they take hostages.

“Please leave this alone,” I whisper, wanting him to stop.

Joe closes the photograph album. “Your memory loss was the result of psychological trauma.”

“I was shot.”

“The scans showed no injuries or bruising or internal bleeding. You didn't get a bump on the head. You didn't lose particular memories; you blocked them out. I want to know why.”

“Luke died more than forty years ago.”

“But you think about him every day. You still wonder if you could have saved him just like you wonder if you could have saved Mickey.”

I don't answer. I want him to stop talking.

“It's like having a film inside your head, isn't it, eh? Playing on a continuous loop, over and over—”

“That's enough.”

“You want to be riding down the icy hill with Luke sitting between your knees. You want to hold on tightly to him and drive your boots into the snow, making sure the toboggan stops in time—”

“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!”

On my feet now, I'm standing over him. My finger is pointed between his eyes. The barman reaches behind the counter for a phone or a metal pipe.

Joe hasn't moved. Christ, he's cool. I can see my reflection—desolate and hollow—mirrored in his eyes. The anger leaks away. My cell phone is rattling on the table.

“Are you OK?” asks Ali. “I heard about what happened at the station.”

Bile blocks my throat. I finally get the words out. “Have you found Rachel?”

“No, but I think I've found her car.”

“Where?”

“Someone reported it abandoned. It was towed away from Haverstock Hill about a fortnight ago. Now it's at a car pound on Regis Road. You want me to check it out?”

“No, I'll go.”

I look at my watch. It's nearly six. Car pounds stay open all night. It's not about the revenue, of course, it's about keeping the city moving. If you believe that I could sell you the Tower of London.

Finishing my beer, I grab my things. The Professor looks ready to wave me off.

“You're coming, too,” I tell him. “You can drive, just keep your mouth shut.”