A knock at the door: the manageress. Housekeeping had confirmed that the safe had not been used. She offered him a room for the night, no charge. He thanked her, asked if there were CCTV cameras in reception or outside. She shook her head. You hate it in the UK, all that constant surveillance, he thought, and then, when you really need it, it’s not there.
‘I’m sorry for what you’re going through,’ she said. ‘I have a daughter, fourteen years old.’
‘Is the room that Amy used available?’ he asked.
‘I can arrange it.’
He picked up his cabin bag from behind reception, took it up to the room with Amy’s rucksack. He walked around the bed, looked in the mirror, tried to imagine her in those clothes, getting ready to go out. He called Mercy.
‘I’m at the hotel,’ he said, ‘in the same room that Amy had.’
‘What’s the news?’
‘She was definitely here. I’ve got her rucksack and clothes. Her passport details are in reception. She used your credit card to book the room and paid in cash.’
‘That was big of her.’
‘She bought some clothes at Heathrow. Going-out, partying clothes. If I give you the details and product numbers of what she bought could you Photoshop her into them and send me the image? I’ll make up a flyer, push it around the bars and discos, see if I can get a lead or at least a sighting.’
Boxer talked her through the bill while she looked the items up online.
‘Have you seen the state of this dress?’ said Mercy.
‘Calling Apollo . . . ?’
‘More like Screaming Sex,’ said Mercy. ‘This is what I’d expect Karen to flooze around in if she had better legs.’
‘I thought they all dressed like that nowadays.’
‘Hooker chic,’ said Mercy. ‘And light on the chic.’
He could sense Mercy trying to keep it all at bay with her savage humour, making light of it so she didn’t drop down the worry hole. He wasn’t going to tell her about the Moroccan guidebook.
‘You all right?’
‘I’m working,’ she said, ‘which is better than not.’
‘I could have had him, you know,’ said Darren. ‘El O-fucking-sito. All strength, you see. No technique, Dad. Know what I mean?’
‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ said Dennis. ‘I had the feeling if you’d dumped him the guns would have come out. I had no idea you were—’
‘I came third in the British Novice Championships hundred-kilo-plus class in November last year,’ said Darren, refilling their glasses from a litre bottle of Mahou beer.
‘Not bad,’ said Dennis. ‘And next time, Darren, just stick to the arm-wrestling, don’t volunteer to take on another hundred kilos when you haven’t got the first bloody idea whether we can shift it.’
‘We can shift it,’ he said, chiding his old dad. ‘I know guys who want to open another five crack labs in Brixton and Stockwell alone. I know there’s been a bit of a lull in the City since the credit crunch, but now they’re back to screaming for it.’
‘That may be the case,’ said Dennis, puffing his cigar back to life. ‘You might have heard that, but you don’t know it. We haven’t done the research on it. Do you know how much we have to come up with for an extra hundred kilos?’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Two million quid.’
‘Shit.’
‘That’s two million a month. And if we can shift it, we end up with six million more we have to send to the laundry and that has to be set up. It doesn’t happen like that,’ said Dennis, snapping his fingers. ‘And if you can’t shift it, where do you put it? The longer you store gear the more likely it is to be found. The risk levels go up. That’s why you don’t make commitments to people like El Osito unless you know you can keep to them. Otherwise you’ll be flushing gear down the crapper just so you don’t end up with half a ton of inventory.’
‘So now what?’
‘We’re going to have to talk him round. Talk him back down. We’re going to have to persuade him that we want to take on the extra gradually.’
‘He’s talking about us taking on five hundred kilos a month by the end of the year.’
‘So we have to say we’ll take twenty-five kilos more a month for four months and then see how it goes before we agree anything more.’
‘He doesn’t look like a gradual kind of bloke to me, Dad.’
‘The good thing is he likes you. You didn’t show him up in front of the Mexicans and that’s important. He’ll remember that. You must never mention it, mind. But that’s what you’ve got between you, right? Are you with me?’
‘So you want me to talk to him about it when we go out tonight.’
‘We’ll be going drinking in bars and clubs. We won’t talk about it then. I’ll leave early. I’m too old for all that crap. You’ve got to find the right moment, in private, to talk to him about it. Like if you go back to his flat, or the Mexicans’ place. Somewhere like that. Not in public. All right?’
‘It’ll have to be, won’t it?’
Boxer was in the square at Puerta del Sol with a handful of flyers, which he was handing out to anybody who would take one. He saw a young guy, no more than twenty-four years old, who had his arm around a girl so pretty that people behaved strangely around her. The couple were huddled under an umbrella with two broken spokes in the throng of people on the square. He felt drawn to them, gave them each a flyer.
‘Who is this?’ asked the young guy.
‘She’s my daughter,’ said Boxer. ‘Seventeen years old.’
‘What happened?’ he asked, holding the paper Boxer had given him up to the light.
‘She flew in from London on Saturday and disappeared on the same night, never went back to her hotel room for the two nights she’d booked, hasn’t been seen or heard from since.’
‘She looks very dark,’ said the guy. ‘For someone English.’
‘Her mother’s from Africa,’ said Boxer.
The pretty girl squeezed his arm in sympathy, said she was sorry.
‘Is this what she looked like when she disappeared?’
Boxer told him about the clothes she’d bought and how he’d got Mercy to Photoshop them onto her photo.
‘That’s cool,’ said the girl.
‘You know, with paper isn’t the way to do it. These people,’ said the guy, sweeping his arm around, ‘don’t look at paper. Paper gets dropped. Paper gets wet. Paper gets cleared away. Paper gets ignored. You stick this up in a bar or club, nobody will see it. You have to get it onto one of these.’
He produced a smartphone. The girl nodded. Encouraging.
‘That would be great if I actually knew anybody here,’ said Boxer. ‘I’m English.’
‘You don’t, but I do,’ said the guy. ‘You got a Twitter account?’
‘No,’ he said, thinking how many times he’d been told to open one.
‘Juan has fifteen thousand followers on Twitter,’ said the girl.
‘Are you a pop star or something?’
‘He tweets cool things,’ said the girl, birdlike under his arm, ‘about art and music.’
‘I thought Twitter was just words and not many of them at a time,’ said Boxer.
‘That’s true, but you can also upload photos and add a message,’ said Juan. ‘You got the photo on your phone?’
Juan opened a Twitter account for Boxer which they called @SeekingAmy and uploaded the photo through Twitpic. He added a message with the number of the Spanish mobile that Boxer had bought at the airport so as not to incur massive roaming charges. Juan re-tweeted the photo and message to his followers.
‘I can pretty much guarantee that everybody in this area will see that tweet in the next hour. The same people hang out here most nights. They’re the regulars. If they’ve seen your daughter they’re mor
e likely to tweet you than call the number so keep looking at the tweets. You can follow mine too, see if they come to me.’
‘You’ll find her,’ said the girl. ‘She’s here somewhere. Don’t worry.’
Boxer went to the Taberna Galacie on Calle del Carmen and ordered a beer, sat with the Spanish mobile and his smartphone in front of him. The last line of Amy’s note, the exact opposite of what the pretty girl had said, reverberated through his mind. He’d offered the couple a drink, but they had places to go, fifteen thousand followers to see or shake off. He’d handed out a few more of the flyers, gone back to the hotel and left some on reception and with the concierge. Already, as he was leaving the hotel, he’d seen the young with their smartphones and a girl with a red dress on their screens and some of his flyers stuck to the wet pavement, trodden in.
He’d left GRM before they started the Twitter and Facebook tutorials. All he’d picked up was bits and pieces from friends who didn’t understand it too well. Amy had actively discouraged him from using it when he’d asked her about it. Said it wasn’t for him. Too banal, she’d said. Now he wondered whether it was because she didn’t want him seeing her tweets. Of course, he and Mercy had been barred from her Facebook page since its inception.
The tweets started coming in during the second half of the first beer. Most of them said, Lo siento. Sorry. But they’d re-tweeted. He suddenly realised how Juan’s fifteen thousand disciples could turn into a complete religion whose sole aim was to find the girl in the red Calling Apollo minidress who didn’t want to be found. And that, of course, was a problem. He’d started this process because his gut was telling him that something had gone wrong. His nose for catastrophe had rarely let him down. He felt it was how he’d survived the 1991 Gulf War intact: knowing a booby-trapped place just by the look of its huddled explosive intent, reading through the innocence that scarfed acute danger in a man’s face. But part of him also believed that he might just be alerting Amy to his imminence, scaring her off. Or was that just hope, batting away his rising fear that he was already too late?
His Spanish mobile rang, startling him. A number he didn’t recognise. A male voice.
9
6:00 P.M., TUESDAY 20TH MARCH 2012
Netherhall Gardens, Hampstead, London
The key to the abduction was Sasha’s craze for trick football,’ said Mercy.
‘That’s all he does all day,’ said Andrei Bobkov, flicking up his feet in imitation. ‘He has a football on his toes every minute of the day, but I tell him it’s not everything. He has to understand the game. That’s why we play chess. I teach him tactics and strategy. Position and play.’
Bobkov was a dark, good-looking man, whose hair had gone to salt and pepper but who retained black eybrows and dark lashes. He’d once been a man in peak physical condition, which was visible from the power in his shoulders and arms, but his jowls and waistline had since seen too many business lunches and dinners. Mercy also saw what Sasha’s teacher, Spencer, had perceived: that Bobkov carried a sense of other things of importance in his life, apart from his business and what he showed of himself. One of those things was, without doubt, his son.
Mercy let him have his say. She could see his emotional involvement with the boy and his desire to express it. Nobody was going to take that away from him.
They were in the living room of his ex-wife’s house. The mess of bottles had been cleared away and the Crisis Management Committee had gathered around a half-full cafetière on the table surrounded by small cups with coffee dregs.
Chris Sexton, the kidnap consultant, who at thirty-five years old was a thickset, square-headed bruiser who’d recently had to give up his positon as tight head prop forward for Saracens in order to pursue his career, had given his introductory speech about how he envisaged the negotiations playing out.
‘The gang’s first contact with Mr. Bobkov was, to my mind, tentative. They were hoping to get Tracey Dunsdon on the line and were unprepared for what happened. They conceded pretty quickly, which indicates that they probably already knew her likely state. Their lack of proof of capture or life might mean they’re inexperienced or they were just probing to see if there was any organisation at this end. Our aim is to keep Mr. Bobkov away from direct talks with the gang to minimise emotional leverage. The Crisis Management Committee will engage as extensively as possible whenever they call. We want to develop relationships with these people, to give ourselves the opportunity through our tracking system to find out where the gang are holding Sasha and to effect his release. The crucial thing is to maintain communication for as long as possible, to be firm without being aggressive and never to show weakness, even in the face of threats.’
Butler, Bobkov’s lawyer, late forties, bald with blond hair streaking across his pate and massively contained by some Savile Row suiting that did its best to supply structure, had sat nodding affirmatively throughout the pep talk in an armchair to Sexton’s right. On the sofa next to Bobkov was James Kidd, the suspected spook from MI5, late thirties, smooth, urbane but with no feature that would help you pick him out in a crowd: brown hair, brown eyes, bland-looking and an occasional tic that meant he winked at disconcerting moments. He offered no visible reaction to Sexton’s vision as if, as far as he was concerned, everything at this stage was conjecture and only the eventual reality was worth considering.
Mercy and the swarthy, dark-haired, Detective Sergeant George Papadopoulos sat on dining chairs, notebooks open.
‘Sasha leaves the house at around seven fifteen every morning,’ said Mercy. ‘He spends the time before school registration practising his latest tricks.’
‘You can’t believe what that boy can do,’ said Bobkov with irrepressible pride.
‘His teacher, Jeremy Spencer, told me that Sasha was normally in school by eight fifteen just after the doors open,’ said Mercy. ‘Except for these last two weeks, when he’s been turning up close to registration time at eight forty-five. The school caretaker told me this so I asked George to build it in to his door-to-door interviews.’
‘Once I knew about the football tricks I started to get a lot more hits from people who remembered seeing Sasha with his ball at that time in the morning,’ said Papadopoulos. ‘Once you’re round the corner from this house in Netherhall Gardens the houses on the right aren’t set back but are actually on the street. A lot of people saw him and they mentioned another kid who’d been getting involved recently. They all say he’s a bit older than Sasha, slightly taller and broader with short blond hair. We’re talking twelve to fourteen years old. The other boy was always wearing a black Adidas tracksuit, white lines down the arms and legs. Black Adidas trainers. Sometimes he had a hood up from under the tracksuit. To start with he didn’t bring his own football and just involved himself with Sasha’s games. By all accounts he was pretty useful with the ball too.’
‘So where did this other boy come from?’ asked Bobkov.
‘I can’t trace him,’ said Papadopoulos. ‘He’s too old to be at the same school, which finishes at eleven years old when they progress to the Westminster school. Further down the road is South Hampstead High, but for girls only. The only other sighting I’ve had so far is from someone who lives on Netherhall Gardens and cuts through Netherhall Way to get to the Finchley Road. She does it every morning at the same time, seven forty, and she’s seen Sasha and this other kid playing for the last ten days or so. She gave me the clothes and physical description. Last Friday this same woman had to go to work early and she found herself down Netherhall Way half an hour earlier, at seven ten. She saw the other boy, Sasha’s footballing partner, get out of a black Mercedes parked by the hedge in front of a block of 1970s flats on the corner.’
‘So this other boy was being positioned as bait,’ said Butler.
‘That’s what it looks like to us,’ said Mercy.
‘Has anyone heard Sasha talking to this boy?’ asked Bobkov. ‘Are they speaking
in Russian or English? Sasha speaks both, although his Russian is elementary it’s still good enough to play soccer.’
‘Not so far,’ said Papadopoulos. ‘I’ve got to find more people who use that cut-through at that time in the morning and anybody who saw him on the morning he was taken. Nobody’s property overlooks Netherhall Way. On one side is the brick wall of a house and opposite is a block of flats behind a hedge. There’s no CCTV either.’
‘So, a carefully chosen place,’ said Bobkov.
‘I have the name of a woman who was friendly with your ex-wife. She had a child at Sasha’s school who’s since moved on to Westminster. Her name is Irina Demidova. I was given an address for her in Cannon Place, but she seems to have moved. Does that name mean anything to you?’
Bobkov shook his head. James Kidd took in the name, processed it.
‘The school was stunned to hear about your ex-wife’s alcoholism,’ said Mercy. ‘Were you aware of it?’
‘I hadn’t realised it was so out of control,’ said Bobkov. ‘Tracey was always up for a good time, but she started drinking more around the time we split up, which I put down to the stress of the situation. I didn’t dispute her custody of Sasha. She was in a much better position to look after him than I was, given my work life, and I knew how important Sasha would be to her at this difficult time. I offered her the house. I hoped that her drinking would sort itself out once I was out of her life and she took full responsibility for the boy.’
‘Does that mean once you left this house you never came back?’
‘I was the focal point of all Tracey’s problems,’ said Bobkov. ‘In my experience of relationships it’s better to remove yourself entirely from the other person’s life, so that they can start again without any distraction from false hope, past pain or residual anger—all those things that mark the end of what had been a good relationship.’
‘You broke it off?’ asked Mercy, entranced by Bobkov’s sincerity.
‘I had to,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to, but she had become so jealous I couldn’t move, I couldn’t look, I couldn’t speak. If the accusation wasn’t on her lips it was incessantly in her mind. We tried marriage counselling, but too many of the meetings ended up focused on her problems and she couldn’t take it.’