The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

29

Wraith

Lorraine Bonner was a broad black woman with a laugh like someone unbunging a sink and enough courage to make the surliest delinquent think twice about disrespecting her. They found her surrounded by cardboard files in the chaotic first-floor office of the council estate’s main block.

“I didn’t think I’d see the two of you again,” she said, pouring thick brown tea from a steel pot the size of an upturned bucket. “I thought that thing with the Highwayman was all over.”

“It is, Lorraine, but Mr May and I have a new problem,” said Bryant, “and we thought you might be able to help us.”

“Can you walk with me while I do my pensioners?” Mrs Bonner delivered meals to the mobility-challenged seniors on the estate every lunchtime. When their own relatives could not be bothered to look after them, she was there to dispense patient kindnesses that had sophisticates sneering, while offering such practical help that they felt ashamed. May explained their mission as she manhandled her protesting trolley into the corridor.

“A lady from the Broadhampton phoned Islington Council to add Tony Pellew to my roster,” she informed them. “They’d got him a one-bedroom apartment on the De Beauvoir estate. He didn’t want to live in South London. His family was originally from around there. Normally we try to return home, don’t we? It’s only natural. You’ll want the address of his flat.”

“How can we get that?”

“My filing system’s in my head, love.” She took a card from May and wrote on the back of it.

“When did you last see him?”

“Well, I got him settled in and popped over a couple of times during the first week, but two weeks ago he went missing. He didn’t have many belongings, just enough to fill a backpack, but the wardrobe was emptied out and the bed hadn’t been slept in.”

“How do you know he wasn’t staying at a friend’s?” asked May.

“His shoes were all gone. You don’t take all your shoes unless you’re not coming back, do you? I had to make a report to his probationer.”

“What was he like?” Bryant wondered, intrigued. “Very quiet and sad, needed fattening up. The sort of man an older lady would like to take under her wing, you know? I heard he’d had a difficult upbringing. I’m not trying to excuse what he did, you just want to understand, don’t you? Well, it’s only human nature, isn’t it?”

“Do you have any idea at all where he went?”

Mrs Bonner gave a shrug. “They come and go, these lost souls, can’t settle, don’t feel comfortable in themselves, do they, just take off one day. London can be so lonely. He can’t leave the country because he hasn’t got a passport. And I don’t think he wants to go far from where his old mum lived, even though she disowned him. He’ll turn up in a shelter somewhere, if he hasn’t already.”

♦

Anthony Pellew’s apartment had an air of abandonment. Its resident had moved on, taking his clothes and the few personal belongings he possessed. Beneath the smell of dust and damp carpeting was the musk of stillness and solitude. The flat had been used for dozens of short-term residents who had passed their time here, seated forlornly on the corner of the single bed, or propped at the square Ikea kitchen table, staring from the window into an unforgiving future. Discoloured edges on the carpet mapped furniture phantoms. The pale squares on the wall left ghosts of old picture frames. Pellew had not succeeded in leaving his mark in the apartment.

The first thing to do was check that he had not tried to return to his former home. Bryant pushed back the door of a kitchen cupboard with the tip of his walking stick and peered inside. The few tins he found were the kind of staples stocked by someone with no interest in food. “He must have left something behind. Everybody who moves out leaves some faint trace. I need to know this man’s history. The bloody cheek of the Broadhampton, palming us off with a bit of paper.”

“It’s not their fault,” said May defensively. “They provide some of the best care in the country. Someone there has been stepped on by the assessment committee. Get April on the phone and have her call the clinic every hour on the half hour until someone gives her the full story.”

While May made the call, Bryant wandered from room to room, wrinkling his nose in the stale, dead air. They were about to lock the place up and head back to the unit when Bryant saw the newspaper cutting that lay pressed behind a sheet of glass on the kitchen table. Withdrawing his reading glasses, he read through it and called May in.

“It looks like he was going to frame this, John. It’s Pellew’s mother.”

The photograph was of a blond crop-haired woman with a hard, almost perfectly square face. Her son’s grainy photograph was inset, and showed a boy with a bowed head emerging from court, his features in shadow.

“She sold her story to our friends at Hard News just a few weeks before her death. ‘Why My Son Must Never Be Freed.’ She used the article to envisage what he would do if he was ever to be granted his freedom. Do you think she’d heard he was being assessed for release? My godfathers.” He sat down and peered closely at the page. “It reads like a blueprint of his activities over the last week. In his state of mind, it’s hard not to think that he’d have seen this as some kind of fateful prediction. ‘Mrs Anita Pellew, the manager of London’s famous old Clock House pub in Leather Lane. ’”

Bryant slapped his hand on the glass-covered sheet. “That’s where he’s gone.”