‘We don’t have any recent photos. She’s refused to be photographed since she was fourteen,’ said Mercy. ‘If we find any . . . ’
The policemen, nodded, stepped forward. Now they shook hands. Boxer walked them to the door, let them out, went back to the living room. A tap on the front door brought him back. DS Jones was there, hands deep in her coat pockets.
‘The last line of her letter said, “If you do investigate my disappearance and I am found, under no circumstances are either of my parents or anyone else in my family to be informed.” I’m sorry. We weren’t supposed to tell you that either. I just wanted to clarify our position here. The DI’s not being a bastard.’
Boxer thanked her, closed the door. ‘What was all that about?’ asked Mercy.
He told her and it was as if he’d jabbed her in the guts with a kitchen knife. She curled up and howled.
They went back to the dance floor, took it by storm. El Osito’s shirt was drenched in seconds, his muscles stood out under the changing lights. He flicked his head back on its bull neck and the sweat sprayed in sparkling droplets.
She was standing at the bar while El Osito went hunting for his friends. The barman came over, gave her a card, nodded at the note written on it and looked down the counter to a young guy standing there, who raised his beer and melted back into the darkness. The note said in English, ‘Be careful of your friend, he has a bad reputation with women.’ She let the card drop to the floor.
El Osito came back, said his friends had gone. They left, went to Kapital and danced for hours, mesmerised by the music, with more coke crashing through their veins.
At five o’clock they were out in the street hailing a cab. They sat in the back and he talked non-stop to the cab driver as he slowly removed her underwear, stuffed the pants into his pocket. They arrived in some residential area about seven kilometres from the centre and El Osito asked the cabbie to pull over at the Metro station of Pan Bendito. They walked to his apartment block, which was up a rough cement pathway behind the Bar Roma. The entrance wasn’t quite as luxurious as she’d been expecting for a man with so much coke on him.
Only now did it suddenly occur to her that she was breaking all the rules. She was drunk and drugged with no idea where she was, with a strange man whose rough, hard hands led her to believe that he was not unaccustomed to violence. Fear was shimmering on the outer reaches of her consciousness as he walked her past the cracked glass of the metal-framed door of the block’s main entrance.
‘Maybe we should go back to the Hotel Moderno,’ she said. He gripped her elbow so hard she winced and couldn’t wrench her arm free.
The lift worked. The doors opened and he shoved her so hard into the filthy cubicle that she hit the far corner and had to save herself with her free arm. She tried to turn, but he was on her, rucking her dress up over her hips, reminding her of her panty-less state. She looked down at something suspect in the corner that had the tackiness of recently dried bodily fluids. Panic trembled in her throat as she felt his powerful urgency, the animal strength beneath the cold, sodden shirt. The lift door opened at the fourth floor. He backed away from her, pulled her round. She tried to push her dress back down and made a run for the door to the stairs. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, and leaned forward, pushing her hard so that she missed the door and hit her head against the brick wall next to it. She fell onto all fours, tried to get to her feet, remembering El Osito’s impression of a cow on ice. She climbed up the rough wall, hiding her face behind her arm, not wanting to see what was going to come next.
It was the turn of la pata grande. He slapped her so hard that she collided with another wall, bounced off it and fell to the floor, hot buttocks on the ice-cold tiles. He grabbed her by the swag of her ringlets, shook her like a naughty pup and dragged her to the door of his apartment. He unlocked it with her still hanging from his brutal fist, threw her into the hallway, slammed the door shut behind him.
In the dark she started to scrabble away from him and he trod down on her leg to stop her as if she were some struggling animal that he still wanted to play with. The only sound was of his belt snarling and snapping through the loops as he tore it from his waist. She remembered that scorpion clasp and the thought of its sting made her whimper.
‘No, please. Please don’t. Please don’t hurt me.’
She flinched as the black air swished above her head and the scorpions made dull hard contact with her forehead and dragged over her eye and cheek. A warm trickle followed their trail and she had the taste of salt and metal in her mouth.
‘I’ll do anything,’ she said, ‘but please don’t hurt me.’
3
6:30 A.M., SUNDAY 18TH MARCH 2012
Mercy Danquah’s house, Streatham, London
We need to talk to this guy too,’ said Mercy, tapping the screen. They were up early, posting Amy’s details on the missing persons websites. Mercy had remembered the photo she’d taken of Amy as she’d come into the Gatwick Airport arrivals hall after her cigarette smuggling jaunt to the Canaries the week before. Amy had met up with a good-looking black guy who’d taken the suitcase full of cigarettes off her hands. That shot was now on her computer and Mercy was looking at the two of them, lingering over the man’s face, trying to work out his age.
Boxer gave her the thumbs-up. He was on the phone to Roy Chapel, the ex-policeman who ran the office of the LOST Foundation. Boxer had already sent him a cropped version of the photo Mercy was looking at. Chapel had said he’d get it out to all the street organisations as soon as.
‘If she’s serious,’ said Chapel, ‘and the picture you’ve painted makes me think she’s worked this out very carefully, she’ll cut all ties. You know how it is: the most successful runaways are the ones who transplant themselves into a new life and never go anywhere near the old one.’
Boxer said nothing. He knew this very well. That was precisely what his own father had done more than thirty years ago. He tried to breathe back down the black hole growing inside him.
‘And to do that at her age,’ said Roy, ‘she’d need help. There’s no way she could do it on her own, and that’s what worries me. Who’s she got holding her hand?’
Mercy wound her finger round at Boxer.
‘We’re building the file now, Roy. We’ll get back to you as soon as it’s complete,’ said Boxer, glad to hang up.
‘We should contact the UK Border Agency,’ said Mercy.
‘Bit early for that.’
‘I’ve got a contact,’ she said, holding up a business card. ‘We were on a course together.’
‘Still too early on a Sunday morning.’
‘What’s the earliest we can go round to Karen’s?’
‘Nine o’clock.’
‘How about eight, given that it’s an emergency? Karen’s mum would understand. She’d be horrified if we left it till nine.’
‘You might find Karen’s none too sensible.’
‘What did Roy have to say?’
‘That he’d be on to all the street organisations first thing.’
‘But what did he say that made you go all quiet?’
Boxer told her about successful runaways needing help.
She turned back to the computer, carried on inputting data into the newly opened Amy file. Everything she could think of.
‘She’s going to make a mistake. She’s going to have to make contact somewhere,’ said Mercy. ‘I know you’re thinking about your father here, but that was different. He was wanted for questioning about a murder. One mistake and he’d have been in jug.’
‘Only if he’d done it,’ said Boxer, surprised to find himself defending the man who’d abandoned him thirty-three years ago.
‘Come on, Charlie, get real.’
‘That look you gave me last night,’ said Boxer, ‘when they asked you for Amy’s DNA . . . what was all that about?’
‘Nothing.?
??
‘It wasn’t nothing.’
‘Just, you know, that they asked for it. Takes it to another level.’
He didn’t believe her. Thought she was hiding something. Dropped it.
They went to work again for an hour, thrashing out everything they could think of, every conceivable contact, even down to the twenty-two-year-old boyfriend Amy had developed when she was a fifteen-year-old on a family holiday in Spain. How would they get in touch with him? Boxer went to the kitchen, made coffee, called Isabel.
‘How’s it’s going?’ said Isabel.
He read her the full text of the note, told her the extent of Amy’s clearout and the lack of police interest.
‘And how’s Mercy taking it?’
‘She’s galvanised. I persuaded her to take a sleeping pill last night, but she was up at six, dying to get on with it. She’s taken Amy’s note as a professional challenge.’
‘Mercy’s going to be doubly hurt—you know that,’ said Isabel. ‘You’re still the only man in her life. She hasn’t got over you. Your attention is focused elsewhere and now the only other big emotional figure in her life has rejected her. She’s going to be fragile.’
‘I know,’ said Boxer. ‘I’m staying here with her. We’re going to have to track Amy down and, at the very least, make sure she’s all right even if we can’t persuade her to come home. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. You have to do this,’ said Isabel. ‘After Alyshia’s kidnap I know what you’re going through. At least Amy’s not in the hands of others. She’s organised and in no immediate danger.’
‘That’s what Amy thinks. She’s got undented self-belief so she thinks she knows what she’s doing and has faith in the people helping her do it, but she’s only seventeen. She reckons she’s cool and clued up but, despite all her escapades, we know from the people we meet in our professional lives she’s no match for an opportunist. That generation just hasn’t had enough face-to-face experience to know when someone means you harm. So neither of us is going to be happy until we know her situation, and from the last line of her note she knows that too.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m beginning to think this is Amy’s ultimate adolescent battle—to take on her parents at their own game and win.’
El Osito came to with a low grunt. He was naked apart from his socks and lying on the bathroom floor between the toilet bowl and the wall. It was daylight. His eyes slid over the glaze of the cheap tiles to the corner and the brush in its ceramic holder for cleaning shit streaks, which he never used. There was a box of pills and a half-empty blister card with the brand name of the benzodiazepine Aneurol. Good. He’d taken a benzo to come down off the coke high. Or maybe not. His head hurt and his thick, heavily muscled body was jammed. Maybe he’d dropped the benzos and fallen, knocking his head trying to retrieve them. He squirmed his way out, hauled his head up to the basin, turned on the tap, scooped water into his dry mouth. He sat on the toilet, relieved himself copiously.
Things started to come back to him from the night before: the girl in the red dress. Dancing with her in the street in front of his freaks on a bet that he couldn’t pull her. Made it look as if it was his dancing skills when it was the promise of a night of downhill skiing that had done the trick. He knew the ones that liked their blow. He wiped his wet hand down his face and his eyes came blinking out of his head as he remembered getting into a taxi, taking off her underwear in the cab, talking to the driver. He focused on his trousers, which he’d trodden out of last night, saw the girl’s knickers stuffed in the pocket.
His brain flickered nervously with jolts of memory. The cab dropping them off at the Pan Bendito Metro station. He never let cabs take him to his door. The walk from there. The girl, a foreigner, not knowing where she was, the grimness of the neighbourhood. Staggering up the path behind the Bar Roma. The cracked glass, the lift, he’d sensed some fear there, had to shove her.
He shook himself and turned to the basin and for the first time saw the blood on the back of his hand, raised his head. Blood on his face and chest. He remembered his favourite scorpion belt snapping through the loops of his jeans, heard it in his head. The buckle whistling through the air.
‘No, please . . . ’ a voice whimpered in his head.
He washed his hands, his face, his chest. The water swirled red down the plughole. He ran his wet hands through his hair, cooling his hot scalp, the heat building in his head.
The corridor was dark and empty. The blinds were down in the rest of the apartment, just cracks of light here and there. A smear of something down the wall. He headed towards the living room. Silence. Had she gone? La guapita? La puta inglesa? He checked the kitchen. The light squeezed behind the blinds made everything grey and grainy in the hard white room. No blood there. He crossed the corridor into the living room. Only one or two cracks in the blinds. He would have to turn on the light. He didn’t want to turn on the light. There was a smell in the room.
El Osito lashed out at the light switch. She was lying on the floor with the red dress up around her neck, her unhooked bra twisted in it. Her legs were apart. There was something . . . He didn’t want to look. He slashed the lights out.
Back to the kitchen. He gripped the sink as a dark pressure took hold in the pit of his stomach.
It came to him in an instant. He knew exactly what he had to do.
‘I’ve called Karen’s mother, and she’ll get her up and sensible in an hour,’ said Mercy. ‘Your gut telling you anything?’
‘No,’ Boxer lied.
It was telling him things and none of them were good. Nothing even specific or relevant. It was just an overwhelming sense that they would all be changed by what had happened. There would be no predictable unfolding, as he’d felt on seeing Isabel last night, walking into her open arms, knowing they had a future.
He called Esme, his mother, who’d been looking after Amy all last week. No answer.
Mercy drove. They parked outside the 1970s block where Karen lived. On the way up the open stairs to the second floor she called her contact at the UK Border Agency, gave him Amy’s details and asked if he could help. He said he’d get back to her one way or the other.
In the living room Karen was sitting on the sofa looking stunned. Her dark hair wasn’t brushed out yet and she was in her mother’s dressing gown. The nail varnish on her toes and fingers was alternately dark blue and fluorescent orange and was chipped. The black tattoos snaking up the olive skin of her calves and forearms made her look more like a Brazilian hooker than a Streatham hairdresser.
‘Your mum told you about Amy?’ said Mercy.
‘Yeah,’ she said, looking at the state of her nails, anything not to have to look at Mercy, who scared her half to death.
‘You got any ideas where she might have gone?’
‘Like . . . no!’ said Karen, suddenly aggressive.
‘Easy up, K,’ said her mother. ‘They’ve lost their daughter.’
‘She didn’t tell me nothing,’ said Karen. ‘If she’d of told me, I’d tell ’em, but she didn’t, so I can’t.’
‘Could we talk to Karen on her own for a bit?’ asked Mercy, who could sense the girl’s fear, too many eyes glued to her.
The panic rose in Karen’s face.
‘Let’s just relax a bit,’ said Mercy. ‘Sit back and breathe. We’re all in a bit of a state. Not enough sleep.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Karen. ‘I don’t know what Amy’s up to. I swear, Mrs. Danquah. You know she keeps things to herself, that one. Too many secrets.’
‘So what happened in Tenerife?’
‘You can’t believe the grief I’ve had from Mum about that. How was I to know she hadn’t told you? How was I to know she should’ve been in Lisbon with her dad? That’s what I mean. She don’t tell me stuff. She keeps it all in, like, tight. I mean, don’t get me
wrong, Mrs. Danquah, she’s a nice girl, Amy. I like her. But she’s a hard friend to have, know what I mean?’
They did.
‘Did she get on with anybody in your boyfriend’s gang? I mean . . . ’
‘Get on with anybody?’
‘Who did Amy end up in bed with?’ asked Boxer.
Karen was relieved to look away from Mercy. She wasn’t sure what wrath was bubbling away under that calm exterior.
‘Amy might not have told you things,’ said Boxer. ‘But you saw things. You were all in the same party.’
Karen nodded. Less of a nod, more of a shuddering blink.
‘Who did she go with?’
‘Glider.’
‘Who’s Glider?’
‘The gang leader. The boss man,’ said Karen. ‘He likes . . . ’
Her eyes shifted uneasily across to Mercy and then quickly back to Boxer.
‘Black girls?’ asked Boxer.
Another imperceptible nod.
‘Where can we find Glider?’
‘North London somewhere. Dunno the address. He keeps it . . . ’
‘Does your boyfriend know where Glider lives?’ asked Mercy.
She shook her head.
‘How come?’
She shrugged.
Mercy found communicating with the young immensely draining.
‘You’re not going to get anybody into trouble,’ said Boxer. ‘This is only about finding Amy, making sure she’s O.K.’
‘I know he doesn’t know cos I asked him. He says Glider likes to keep it all . . . separate, like. Nobody knows what anybody else is doing. He says if the police break into one part of his operation it doesn’t mess up the rest of the show.’
‘What about the black guy who met Amy off the flight in Gatwick? The one who took the suitcase of cigarettes off her.’
‘You mean, was she sleeping with him?’
‘No, I didn’t mean that, but . . . was she?’
‘No. She only met him once, for five minutes, just so he’d know her face.’