The Traitor's Story (3 page)

“Don’t worry, we’re not going that way.”

He couldn’t take her home, though. He didn’t know how Sofi would react, and it was best for her not to be involved in this—whatever this was. He needed to get the girl somewhere safe, with someone he could trust, someone who could speak Russian. Harry was the only option, and it helped, too, that he was in the business.

Finn pointed and said, “This way,” and they started walking. Almost immediately, the girl put her hand in his. She was tall enough that from a distance she might have passed as his girlfriend, but there was no mistaking the nature of that hand in his—it was that of a child to an adult, a yielding of responsibility. She was entrusting herself to him, and he only wished he could be as confident as she was that he was worthy of that trust.

Chapter Three

Fate was a small, crammed place that specialized in a certain kind of student fashion—he could imagine plenty of young wannabe poets and indie folk-rock kids wearing the stripy Breton sweaters and disheveled blazers and other overpriced jumble.

A couple of them were working in the store, including a girl who wore a flowery summer dress over a T-shirt, the outfit finished off with a cardigan that looked on the verge of falling apart. She was pretty, but looked at Finn with a smile that was borderline patronizing.

He smiled back. He was too old to be shopping here, that was for sure, but he guessed he wasn’t quite old enough to have a daughter who’d shop here. A younger girlfriend, perhaps?

Adrienne was a few years younger than him but he looked at
the rails of clothes and could imagine her turning her nose up, at
the quality rather than the style. Adrienne had that French thing for quality, for wearing it well—even as he prepared to speak, his thoughts raced off like an outrider toward her.

He put the photograph of Hailey on the counter and said, “I
wonder if you could help. Have you seen this girl shopping in here recently?”

The assistant looked suspicious, her smile falling away into unfriendliness as she said, “I couldn’t tell you if she had. It would be a breach of privacy for us to talk about our customers. And, anyway, you could be anyone.”

She hadn’t even looked at the photograph, but she glanced down at it now. It was subliminal, but he could tell she recognized Hailey—hardly surprising given that she’d been in here nearly every day for over a week.

“I’ll tell you who I am—I’m working for her parents. See, the girl in that picture is fifteen and she’s disappeared. So I understand what you’re saying about privacy, but we know she was shopping here—and if I don’t ask you, it’ll be the police calling in.”

“When you say she’s disappeared . . .” The assistant’s colleague, a tall, thin guy with the beginnings of a beard and a striped blazer that looked two sizes too small for him, had been hovering nearby but he stepped closer now. “I think we can tell him. She’s American, right?”

Finn nodded.

The guy picked up the photograph. “She looked a little older in person. She wasn’t a regular customer but the last . . . ten days, maybe, she’s been in here nearly every day, if not every day.”

“Okay.” Finn took the tags from his pocket and said, “These are some of the things she bought—could you show me what they are?”

The female assistant looked to her colleague for approval and then said, “Of course, let’s see what we have here.”

She showed him half a dozen items—a pair of jeans, a few long-sleeved T-shirts, a cardigan, a threadbare knitted sweater—and couldn’t resist saying how great or how popular the various pieces were. Even without the clothes Hailey had bought in other stores, he could see the beginnings of a look here, a kind of capsule wardrobe that was just a few vital notches more bohemian, more lived-in, than the way Finn remembered her.

Finally, the assistant said, “I’m not sure if that helps—I mean, you said she disappeared, right?”

“Yeah. She ran away, but the circumstances are odd, and trust me, this tells me a lot.” He looked at the girl, who seemed to have been won over somehow, as if the act of showing him the clothes had helped her understand the seriousness of what he was doing. “If she was here every day for a week or more, she must have talked.”

The girl nodded. “But only about the clothes—what she liked, what she didn’t, that kind of thing.”

The male assistant said, “How did the clothes tell you something?”

Finn looked around the shop. “They confirmed something I already suspected. She wanted to look older. I guess with these clothes she’d look like a student, not a schoolgirl.”

The guy said, “You know, now that you’ve told us, I can see she did look like a schoolkid, especially when she first came in. I didn’t see it at the time, but yeah, with these clothes and the haircut.”

“What haircut?”

“Oh, she’d cut her hair, man—like, the last time she was in here, maybe two days ago?”

Finn looked through the receipts and said, “Four days ago.”

“No, she came in after that. Friday.
Three
days ago. I can’t remember what she bought, but she bought something, and I mentioned her hair, how cool it looked. She said she’d just had it done.”

“What was it like?”

“Short, like a boy’s, and she’d had it lightened—you know, the way some of these actresses are wearing it now. I guess it should have made her look younger, but thinking back, it didn’t, it kind of made her . . .” His words dried up, as if he’d realized he was about to say something he shouldn’t. Finally, he added, “She didn’t seem unhappy. I mean, she didn’t act like someone who needed to run away.”

Finn picked up the photo. “I know. Thanks for your help.”

As he walked out of the shop, the female assistant said, “I hope you find her!”

He raised his hand in an acknowledging wave but didn’t turn, and nor did he visit any of the other stores.

Hailey’s new identity had been planned carefully. She was at that fluid age anyway, when girls could morph into women with a change of clothes and the wrong make-up, but she’d judged it perfectly in only seeking to make herself a few years older: a student, a recognizable type. Like the assistants in the store, people would see the clothes, the hairstyle, the attitude, and it would never occur to them that they were looking at someone who was fifteen.

Fifteen no longer even seemed so very young. He’d been thinking of the Hailey he knew—albeit less well than perhaps he should have—a girl who still seemed like a child in his memory. No doubt her parents thought of her the same way, and yet Finn’s visit to Fate had made him see that she was on the cusp of adulthood. Maybe she wasn’t streetwise, something Debbie had insisted upon, but even if that were true, it wouldn’t stop her from
acting
streetwise.

He walked back, letting the chill and the late-afternoon sun work through him. He thought of Adrienne a couple of times and took his phone out, but put it back without calling her. It was pointless trying to speak to her when he still didn’t know why she’d left.

It didn’t help that he’d thought everything had been okay between them—routine, perhaps, which was understandable after four years, but still okay. Now, looking back, he felt how Debbie and Ethan Portman had to be increasingly feeling about their own lives, that he’d completely failed to see the warning signs, that he’d taken her love and her very presence for granted.

In a sense, though, Finn had more in common with Hailey than her parents, because he knew at some instinctive level that it was he who’d run away, not Adrienne. He’d been running away from his own past—that was the clichéd and comforting lie he told himself—but he’d run from her in the process.

As he neared home, he started to think about Hailey again, about the news he had to pass on to her parents. Superficially it was less than encouraging, and he could see that it would come as another blow to them. Not only had their daughter planned to run away, she’d made herself older.

The most innocent explanation was that she’d wanted to avoid suspicion as she traveled alone across Europe. More likely, she’d done it because the “friends” she claimed to be staying with were older themselves and she wanted to fit in with them, to match the persona she’d probably created online. For all the talk in the media of grooming and child exploitation, it was probably that simple.

Yet, strangely, even as his interest in the disappearance of Hailey Portman should have been waning, even as he should have been dismissing her as a spoiled and selfish kid, he actually found himself more intrigued. It was almost like the frisson he felt when he started working on a new book, the sense that this familiar story contained some deeper mystery, if only he could peel back the layers and find it.

Chapter Four

He stood outside their apartment for a moment, listening. It was so quiet he assumed Ethan wasn’t back, but when Finn knocked, it was Ethan who opened the door. For a moment there was a look of hostile confusion on Ethan’s face, so much so that Finn wondered if Debbie had told her husband about his involvement.

His expression uncoiled, though, and he stood back as he said, “Hey, Finn, we really appreciate this. Come in.”

Finn stepped into the apartment, but wondered now if Debbie had oversold the help he was offering.

“Any luck with the embassy?”

Ethan shook his head as he closed the door, saying quietly, “Not really, but Debbie called me about the passport while I was there and they said something about putting a watch on it.”

“Good—well, that’s something.” He didn’t want to say what he was really thinking, that it meant nothing, that Hailey was most likely still in Europe, that she’d taken the passport in the full knowledge that she’d almost certainly never have it checked.

“Come through to the living room. Debbie’s just lying down for a little while.”

Finn nodded and followed him, but no sooner had he sat down on one of the small sofas than Debbie came into the room. Her eyes were a little reddened but she didn’t look as if she’d been sleeping.

Their earlier awkwardness seemed to be forgotten, and she looked at him now as if he was one of the family, rallying around in a crisis, and said, “Can I get you a drink?”

“I’m fine, thanks. Why don’t you both sit down?” Debbie sat down immediately, urgently, but Ethan hesitated, with the look of someone who wished he could put off what he was about to hear. Finn said, “It’s nothing bad, I just found out quite a bit.”

Debbie nodded, as if she felt this justified her decision to approach Finn in the first place. Yet he’d done no more than anyone else could have done. Ethan sat, too, not quite relaxing.

“Okay, I went to Fate, the store where the paper bags came from. As we knew, she’d been in there nearly every day for over a week. It’s clear from what she bought that she was creating a new wardrobe—what I could only describe as a kind of student look. I also learned that three days ago, presumably between the last time she saw you and disappearing, she had her hair lightened, and cut short like a boy’s.”

Ethan looked more shocked by the final revelation than Finn had anticipated, and sounded devastated as he said, “She cut her hair?” Finn wondered if it was a typical paternal response—the cutting of the hair symbolizing that he’d lost his little girl, no matter what happened now, that she was growing up and becoming her own person.

Debbie said, “Do you have any idea why?”

“Yeah. I’m pretty certain she did it to make herself look older, just by a few years—that’s backed up by what the people in the store said. Maybe she just thought it would be easier to travel that way, or maybe . . .” He looked at both faces, making sure they were still with him. “Was she very active online? I mean, did she generally talk about online friends?”

Finn hardly expected she would have mentioned the kind of online friend she might run away to meet, but he thought she might have spoken about other virtual friends, giving him an idea of how active she was when it came to social networks and forums.

Debbie looked horrified as she thought through the implications and said, “Oh my God, you don’t think she’s been . . .”

“I don’t think anything—not yet.”

Actually, what he thought was that Hailey might have been the instigator in whatever had happened. He had no reason for thinking that, and even her intricate planning might have been a response to someone with a very sophisticated grooming technique.

It was instinct alone that convinced him she hadn’t been the victim of some wily and predatory man, but his instincts had been wrong in the past—sometimes spectacularly wrong.

Ethan said, “I don’t think she really has many online friends. She uses the Internet, naturally, but if she contacts people it tends to be her friends here.”

“And you’ve spoken to all of them.”

He nodded. “Even Jonas didn’t know anything.”

Finn hadn’t even had time to respond when Debbie offered up
an explanation, saying, “He’s not a boyfriend—they’re just the closest of friends, almost inseparable. You’ve probably seen him with her.”

“I’m not sure. Possibly.”

“They’re both very strong academically. They often work on projects together, that kind of thing, and they do a lot of the same classes.”

Ethan nodded in agreement and said, “He’s a lovely kid. He’s pretty cut up about it, too.”

For some reason, Finn latched on to the tone Ethan had used for the words “lovely kid”—it was the way someone might talk about a child if they were disabled in some way, fighting a battle against life.

“Jonas? Swiss . . . ?”

“Half-Austrian, half-Australian—he finds that pretty funny.”

“Is there something wrong with him?” They looked confused,
as if they thought the question was a response to the statement about his nationality. “Just something in the way you spoke about him a moment ago. It suggested—I don’t know, that there’s something . . .”

Debbie looked like someone venturing into dangerous territory as she said, “Jonas is exceptionally intelligent.”

“Off the scale,” said Ethan.

“This is strictly between the three of us, of course, because he hasn’t been diagnosed and his parents don’t seem to think there’s any cause for concern, but Ethan and I . . . we suspect he might be mildly autistic.”

“Or more specifically Asperger’s. But Finn, we know him well enough to know that he’s in the dark on this. He looked seriously put out when he heard she was missing.”

“Maybe because he thought he was going with her.” He caught their expressions and added, “I’m not suggesting that—I’m just trying to make clear that things aren’t always as they seem.” He stood up. “Let me have a think about my next move, but in the meantime, let me know if you hear anything from the police or the embassy.”

Ethan stood, looking full of gratitude as he said, “Finn . . . both Debbie and I—”

Finn put his hand up to stop him.

“Don’t. If I find your daughter you can thank me then. But I doubt it’ll come to that—I’m sure she’ll get in touch first, or the police will find her. You know, they might act like they’re not doing much, but they will be, behind the scenes.”

Debbie stood, too, and said, “She’s such a good girl.”

He wanted to tell her how pointless that phrase was, how ridiculous, particularly under the circumstances.

Instead, he said, “Debbie, we all do stupid things. And for all the news stories you hear, there actually aren’t that many bad people in the world.”

She looked reassured and yet Finn was lying, because he knew there were more than enough bad people to do for Hailey Portman. There were so many varieties of bad that it really didn’t bear thinking about, and he knew that better than most, because he had been one of them.