‘That’s where I was hoping for some help from you,’ said Boxer. ‘There’s something … not quite right about her. I was hoping for some intuition of the female kind.’
‘Not quite right?’
‘I can’t explain it,’ said Boxer. ‘At one point I asked her how old she was and she said twenty-eight.’
‘That’s how she dresses.’
‘Then she said she was twenty … ish.’
‘Same as me … ish.’
‘It’s not her age that bothers me. It’s her instinct for lying, which is never good in a client. And … there’s something else.’
‘Maybe she wanted you to take her seriously.’
‘I took her seriously all right,’ said Boxer. ‘I had no problem with that. Never for a moment struck me as someone to take lightly. You?’
‘What?’
‘Come on, Amy, get your head in gear,’ said Boxer. ‘That girl’s trouble and I can’t see why. Let’s have some youthful insight.’
‘Like?’
‘She seemed attracted to you.’
‘Lesbian?’ said Amy, scoffing. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Dad. Male fantasy.’
‘Not mine,’ said Boxer. ‘You came in, she introduced herself and when she turned back to me she was …’
‘What?’
‘In a heightened state.’
‘Of what? Excitement?’
‘Looked like it to me.’
‘I didn’t get anything like that off her,’ said Amy. ‘We just talked.’
‘Are you going to go to the Sarah Lucas show with her?’
‘Like I said, if somebody lets me get on with my work.’
‘Call me. Let me know how it goes. What’s she do … Sarah Lucas?’
‘You don’t need to know.’
‘Did Siobhan give you her mobile phone number?’
Amy nodded. Boxer beckoned it out of her. It was different to the one she’d given him.
‘One other thing,’ he said, from the doorway. ‘Call the Savoy and just make sure for me that Siobhan Jensen was staying there these last few nights.’
4
17.55, 15 January 2014
Marylebone High Street, London W1
Boxer walked down to Oxford Street automatically checking his back, making sure he wasn’t being followed. He was clean. As he took the escalator down into Bond Street tube, he looked up, saw Siobhan standing at the railing looking down on him. She tinkled a wave, raised an eyebrow. Con had taught her a few things.
In Green Park he made his way to the bench where he always met Martin Fox. It was empty. He was glad of his fleece-lined hat as he sat waiting in the freezing dark.
Martin Fox approached from Constitution Hill. His office was in Victoria, on the other side of Buckingham Palace, which was now lit up behind him, making the park feel darker. His silhouette, with fedora, raised collar and flared trench coat, gave him the look of a professional cliché. His shoes with steel heel tips rang out on the wet tarmac between the high bare trees and the gleaming grass. He hovered to see whether a handshake was forthcoming. It wasn’t. He sat on the bench leaving a good space between them. Silence, apart from the distant roar of the metropolis.
‘Been working, Charlie?’
‘I’ve been playing a quiet game since that D’Cruz job a couple of years ago.’
‘I heard about your daughter’s … travails,’ said Fox.
‘Who from?’
‘Your mate in MI6, Simon Deacon. We meet in the Special Forces Club once a month. He says he hasn’t seen much of you either.’
‘Been keeping a low profile,’ said Boxer. ‘In fact I’ve been spending as much time with Amy as I can. I’ve done some “reprioritisation”, as you’d probably call it.’
‘I can understand that after what you went through,’ said Fox. ‘How’s Mercy these days?’
‘She’s still with the Met’s Kidnap and Special Investigations Unit, but not quite as driven as she was before,’ said Boxer. ‘She’s done some …’
‘Some what?’
Boxer decided against it. Fox knew far too much as it was.
‘What can I do for you?’ asked Fox, feeling Boxer dry up. ‘I haven’t got any work, if that’s what you’re after. You’ve drifted off the scene since D’Cruz.’
‘I’m all right on that score. I did some jobs in South America to keep my hand in.’
‘Who gave you those?’
‘My US contacts,’ said Boxer, no names, Fox always digging.
‘Well we haven’t come out in the cold and wet for a drink,’ said Fox, ‘so what is it?’
‘Do you know a lawyer called Mark Rowlands?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know a security contractor called Conrad Jensen?’
‘I know that name.’
‘But nothing about him?’
‘Not off the top of my head other than that he has contracts with the American military,’ said Fox.
‘For what?’
‘Security and IT, I think. Not sure of the specifics,’ said Fox. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘There’s been an approach.’
‘To work for him?’
‘You sound surprised.’
‘As far as I know he doesn’t touch kidnap negotiating,’ said Fox. ‘Unless he’s making a move into that part of the market, which seems … unlikely.’
Silence again. A helicopter scudded above the stripped trees, lights winking.
‘Or,’ said Fox, ‘is this a roundabout way of telling me he’s been kidnapped and you’re looking for intelligence? Except …’
‘What?’
‘Nobody would come to you direct with a job like that. They’d go to GRM. Are we going to lay our cards on the table or are you going to play me the whole night long?’
‘The person who made the approach knew something about me.’
Fox turned his head slowly in Boxer’s direction.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘and you think because of what came out about your “additional service” in the D’Cruz case that I’m responsible?’
‘It occurred to me.’
‘Let’s get something straight about your “special service”, Charlie. You started it. You left GRM. I gave you a job. The first one passed off without incident. Then there was the case of Bruno Dias’s daughter, Bianca, which went horribly wrong. You got her back, but badly damaged. It had an effect on you. Then you did the Russian job with the Ukrainian gang and that’s when you offered your special service. Not me. You. The Russian gave you the intelligence and you followed it up. When the Russian offered you money, you told him you’d prefer a donation to LOST.’
‘How did Bruno Dias know about the LOST Foundation and that I’d be open to him making a contribution for the work he wanted me to do?’ asked Boxer. ‘You know I can’t afford those offices we’ve got in Jacob’s Well Mews. They’re Bruno’s donation.’
‘That was just coincidence. As I remember it, Amy was supposed to go with you on that trip. If she’d been there, none of that would have happened.’
‘The coincidence is you, Martin. He knew about my special service from you. I’ve become your niche in the kidnap consulting business. Why would anybody go to Pavis when GRM are just down the road?’
Nothing back from Fox.
‘You were the one who started offering my special service, Martin,’ said Boxer. ‘And that was not your prerogative. You told Dias. Just admit it, for God’s sake.’
‘All right, yes, I told Dias. He was mad with rage …’
‘And now it’s out there, which is why this girl came to see me this afternoon. I know she knows. I can see it in her eyes. And she’s been told to be careful. Not to say it to my face.’
‘Which girl?’
‘Conrad Jensen’s daughter.’
‘And she heard it from her father’s lawyer, Mark Rowlands.’
‘Who got it from where?’ said Boxer.
‘Not me,’ said Fox. ‘Are you trying to find o
ut if I’m making an indirect approach to you to recover Conrad Jensen?’
‘Are you?’
‘No. Rowlands could have got that information from …’
‘Where?’
Silence.
‘This is what I don’t like,’ said Boxer. ‘It’s getting to be common knowledge.’
He could hear Fox thinking.
‘Has Conrad Jensen been kidnapped?’ he asked eventually.
‘Nobody’s asked his daughter for a ransom yet and it’s been three days.’
‘So what exactly is the job?’
‘To find him.’
‘But why you?’
‘That’s what I want to find out,’ said Boxer.
Amy turned right out of Whitechapel tube station and, walking through the vestiges of the Bangladeshi market, which was being packed up for the night, headed for the glittering helix lines of the distant Gherkin.
There was a very long, stone-cold sober queue outside one entrance to the Whitechapel Gallery, while a gaggle of less sober people were steaming out of another. Two bouncers manned the door, rebuffing chancers who could see where the party was. Amy sent a text to Siobhan, who told her to ask for Kev at the door. Kev took out his mobile phone, checked it, compared Amy’s face with what he had on the screen and carved her away from the scrum outside.
Siobhan was striding down the corridor with two glasses of pink champagne. Before Amy could ask how Kev could possibly have had a photo of her on his mobile, Siobhan handed her a glass, chinked it with her own.
‘Let’s take a look,’ she said, and grabbing Amy by the arm led her into the main gallery, which had the feeling of bedlam about it, as wildly dressed couples circled exhibits: a vest stretched over a table with two Galia melons hanging in the neckline, next to a filthy, torn mattress with two fried eggs and a coat hanger with a kipper dangling below.
‘The Full English Nightmare,’ said Amy.
Siobhan laughed and they wandered underneath Zeppelins with masturbating arms upstairs through a room of photos of a male dangling steak above his genitals, opening a beer can as if it was his cock and the predictable foamy spurt. Siobhan only slowed as she came to a couple of vast bleached male members, which appeared like the abandoned driftwood beams of an ancient galleon, where she emptied her glass. They went downstairs to the bar where she poured more champagne.
‘What do you think?’
‘Glad my dad didn’t come,’ said Amy.
‘Modern art not his scene, or just embarrassing to stand next to your pa looking at a tumescent three-metre cock on the floor?’ asked Siobhan. ‘Sarah’s obsessed.’
‘You know her?’
‘Sure?’
‘How?’
‘I’m interesting,’ said Siobhan. ‘Fancy one of these?’
She flipped the lid of a small tin box to reveal some white pills.
‘What are we talking about?’
‘Ecstasy … nothing wild.’
They socked back a pill each. Siobhan refilled the glasses.
‘So what makes you so interesting?’ asked Amy.
‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘Lucian Freud wanted to do me when I was thirteen, but my father wouldn’t have it.’
‘Do you?’
‘Paint me.’
‘He had a bit of a rep for the other.’
‘My father’s objection wasn’t that he might have fucked me,’ said Siobhan. ‘More to do with wanting me to sit for five hours a day for a year. We weren’t in London that much and, shit, I mean that’s like two thousand hours of your life.’
‘My father would’ve probably killed him.’
Siobhan stared at her for a beat.
‘But if he was painting you,’ she said, ‘trying to see into you? I mean, looking at you as if you were an animal. Don’t you think that would be fascinating and … seductive?’
Amy had her back to a white brick wall. The drug was making her more alert to the people around her, mellowing her insides too, making them treacly. Siobhan loomed over her. She was taller on her high heels. Amy sipped her champagne, wouldn’t look her in the eye, not sure what she’d find there.
‘A friend of my father’s seduced me like that,’ said Siobhan. ‘Didn’t just take an interest in me as a kid, asked me what I thought about stuff … like my mother dying. Nobody would talk to me about that. Most people just glide past each other. They don’t dig. Too afraid of what they’ll bring to the surface.’
‘How old was your father’s friend?’
‘Sixty-eight.’
‘God.’
‘Does that disgust you?’
‘So how old’s your father?’
‘Seventy-two,’ said Siobhan. ‘My mother was twenty-three when she met him. There was an age difference of twenty-one years. Age doesn’t mean that much to me. Nor gender.’
She kissed Amy on the lips, her tongue darting between her teeth, sliding over her tongue, the roof of her mouth, quick, electric. The charge slammed into the back of Amy’s head, ran down her spine and legs, earthed into the tiled floor.
5
18.30, 15 January 2014
Green Park tube station, London W1
A call. Boxer remembered he hadn’t spoken to the heating engineer who was installing a new radiator in his Belsize Park flat.
‘How’s it going?’
‘All done, Charlie. Now all you need is a decent boiler. The one you got in there would make them go quiet on the Antiques Roadshow. And by the way, who’s Charles Tate?’
‘Me.’
‘Not according to my invoice.’
‘Yeah, I know, too complicated to go into, but … it’s me. Why?’
‘I found a package addressed to Charles Tate under the floorboards when I was putting in the new pipework. Feels like a video cassette. I’ve left it on the kitchen counter.’
Boxer hung up. He had been about to go round to see Isabel, who’d just flown back from Mumbai after six weeks with her daughter, but now he had to investigate that package, couldn’t resist it. He called Isabel, who said she was still groggy with jet lag and would rather he left it until later.
Crammed into a rush hour tube, he stared into the coated backs of the passengers pressed against him. The time he’d spent as a boy and an adult searching that flat for a letter, a card, any tiny scrap of a note from his father. Something that would tell him, personally, why he’d had to go, to abscond, why he’d had to bloody leave him, his only child. It was the main reason he hadn’t sold the flat. Couldn’t bear the idea that he might have missed something.
He’d persisted in the belief that his father was a straight guy. He was an accountant, for God’s sake, trained at Price Waterhouse no less. Studied PPE at Oxford University. A judo champion. One of the four judokas the British team was going to send to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics until he’d torn his knee ligaments. A man who didn’t smoke, hardly drank, hadn’t even got any points on his driving licence. They didn’t come straighter than his dad, David Tate.
Then, as a homicide cop, Boxer had looked into his father’s cold case, the John Devereux file, which had been the only reason he’d become a detective. Devereux was the TV commercials director his mother, Esme, had produced for until he’d been found murdered in his Bibury home on 13 August 1979. The next day his father had absconded before the police could interview him. Boxer had been determined to prove his father’s innocence, but the investigation hadn’t been quite so straightforward and had been the main reason he’d left the police force to become a kidnap consultant. Sod history. History had never done him any favours.
And now here he was again. Hunting after history.
He got back to the flat in Belsize Park by seven o’clock. The package was addressed to him in his father’s handwriting. CHARLES TATE in big capitals. It was Esme who’d changed his surname to her maiden name when it was clear her husband wasn’t coming back. On the reverse side, again in his father’s hand, were the words: To my only son, Charlie. Lots of love, Dad xxx. He
remembered the madly scribbled note that Esme had shown him nearly two years ago, when Amy had run away using the same words in her note that his father had written on the day of his disappearance: You will never find me. This time the writing was not as erratic as that note to Esme, but not as neat as other letters he’d inspected over the years.
Boxer had a sudden vision of his father sprinting up to the top of the house during those last, mad minutes before vanishing into oblivion, picking up a holdall, stuffing clothes into it as he went. But then he couldn’t quite picture him with the time or presence of mind to find a cassette tape, fit it into an envelope, write his son’s name on both sides, rip up the carpet, claw a hammer into the crack of a floorboard, wrench it up, throw the package into the cavity, hammer the pins back and kick the carpet over the grippers. No, this was done well before that awful day.
It touched Boxer to think of his father doing this for him. All those years living in hope that he would have secreted a note to him and yet it had never occurred to him to look under the floorboards. Why would he? Why would Mr Straight Tate leave a package under the floorboards? He realised now that this must have been planned and that there was some calculation involved. He wasn’t supposed to find it immediately. Maybe it was inappropriate for a seven-year-old’s eyes. It struck him, too, that this was supposed to be found only by happenstance or not at all. It was curious to feel his father’s mind at work. Perhaps not so different from his own as he thought of his safe with his poker winnings, the piles of cash in different denominations, the gun under the kitchen floor with the spare magazines and his secret numbers. As if he, too, knew that one day he might have to get out of his life with only moments to spare. Maybe we’re all like this, he thought, fingering the package.
He turned it over and over in his hands, imagining his father’s touch and care all over it. It was a buff envelope with a butterfly fastening, which had been taped over as well. The glue had aged and dried so the tape came away easily. He pinched open the butterfly and a video cassette slid out. Boxer recognised the old Betamax tape that had enjoyed brief popularity before the VHS format took over, because his mother’s production office had been full of them.