Then You Were Gone (18 page)

Jazzy cleared his throat. ‘Hi, Keith. This is Ayanna. She works for us at Anastasia, she’s the cleaner.’ Actually Ayanna had nothing to do with Anastasia, she was employed by the people they leased the building from, but Jazzy wanted to give some plausible reason for her being there. ‘She’s helping me out while Mack’s away.’

If the mention of Mack’s name troubled Keith, his voice gave no sign of it. It was the same familiar cool rasp. ‘Well, don’t just stand there. Come on in.’

The gates swung slowly open and Jazzy crunched self-consciously up the short gravel drive, with Ayanna trailing half a pace behind him.
New money
, thought Jazzy uncharitably. It was barely even worthy of being called a drive, let alone needing remotely controlled gates. Keith could have virtually leaned out the front window and opened them for him. The front door opened moments before Jazzy reached it.

‘Good afternoon, Jeffrey.’

Jazzy forced a smile. ‘Keith, I’ve told you. It’s Jazzy, everyone calls me Jazzy.’

Keith shrugged. ‘Whatever you say, Jeffrey. Now come in, take that weight off.’ He reached over and patted Jazzy’s stomach and Jazzy stiffened. He was six foot three and, at less than thirteen stone, hardly at risk of obesity, but Petra had mentioned a couple of times recently that she thought he was developing a bit of a paunch and Keith had managed, yet again, to find a raw nerve and hit it dead centre.

‘You don’t mind taking your shoes off, do you?’ Keith went on. ‘Her ladyship insists, I’m afraid.’ He ushered them into a vast lounge, over-furnished and under-decorated with a background smell of plug-in air fresheners mixed with a faint echo of last night’s cigarette smoke. At Keith’s insistence Jazzy took the armchair nearest the door and accepted a tumbler of Scotch, wishing desperately that he had not chosen to wear the ‘World’s Best Daddy’ socks that Rory had given him for Father’s Day. Ayanna refused Keith’s offer of the sofa and instead perched on the arm of Jazzy’s chair. She had not taken her shoes off. Jazzy wished, not for the first time, that he had half her balls.

‘Nothing’s wrong is it?’ Keith asked as he sat down opposite Jazzy.

Jazzy eyed him for a second. ‘No. Why would anything be wrong?’

‘It wouldn’t. Just asking.’

‘Well, no, everything’s OK. I just…’ The journey over there had at least allowed Jazzy time to think up a story to tell Keith, but in the end he had given up and decided that an approximation of the truth might be more likely to break down Keith’s defences. ‘I think you know Mack’s still not back, don’t you?’

Keith shrugged in an attempt at casual insouciance, but Jazzy noticed his eyes narrow and darken. ‘I assumed not as I hadn’t seen him. Like I said though, he’s owed some time off isn’t he? I’m not going to go chasing him to come back, the boy’s a grown man now.’

A few days ago this attempt to make Jazzy feel like a fussy mother-hen might have worked, but after everything, after Rory’s nursery, after the break-in, after the brief, pained phone call he had received from Simone early that morning explaining that a big, scary man had frightened her off the train but that she would be home later that day, Jazzy was unwilling to be shamed into leaving well enough alone. ‘Well, maybe,’ Jazzy said in a forcedly moderate tone, ‘but we,’ he gestured at Ayanna, ‘you know, the people who really know him well,’ he added, unable to resist. Keith loved to act as though he was the only person who really knew and understood Mack and this was bound to sting. ‘We think that he ought to have been back by now, or at least to have been in touch. It isn’t like him, you must admit that. And there were a few things that he did and said before he disappeared,’ Jazzy had chosen that word,
disappeared
, very deliberately, ‘that make us think there might be more to this than just a spur of the moment holiday.’

‘Like what?’ Keith snapped, before Jazzy had finished speaking. ‘Said things? Did things? Like what?’ he repeated, and at that moment Jazzy knew. Keith knew where Mack had gone, or at the very least why he had gone. And he was very, very keen to hide that information from Jazzy. Strangely, this realisation gave him an amount of confidence. On the journey down here, he and Ayanna had agreed they would not mention Rory’s nursery or the man at Ayanna’s college or last night’s break-in. If, and the idea still seemed far-fetched to Jazzy, Keith had played a part in any of it, then the mere fact of their not mentioning it would make it clear to him that they did not trust him. Jazzy’s plan was that this would make them seem as though they were not scared or intimidated in the hope that Keith decided they were tougher than he thought and that he should stop messing with them. Although, another faint but insistent voice in his head who happened to sound a lot like Petra kept repeating, surely a person who was not intimidated by someone breaking into their house in the middle of the night and leaving some newspaper cuttings behind along with a note reading ‘DO NOT DISTURB’, was not tough at all, but rather foolhardy and perhaps a bit stupid.

They had however decided that they would give Keith whatever information they had so far gathered themselves, which was to say not very much. There was still the chance that Keith might decide to help them, that he might genuinely be in the dark as much as they were, that he might want desperately for Mack to come home, just as they did. And if that was not the case then, Jazzy hoped again, it would make them seem tough and clued up and not the kind of people to be messed with. Jazzy looked at his novelty socks and at Ayanna’s skinny form curled on the arm of his chair and wondered just what kind of people they did seem like.

Ayanna spoke up before Jazzy could. ‘He bought some false IDs and stuff, but they weren’t for him, they were for some girl,’ she said, her words tumbling over each other. ‘And then after he’d gone we found another birth certificate for a young girl in his flat. Or at least Simone did, you know Simone, his kind-of girlfriend or whatever…’

‘She is his girlfriend,’ Jazzy interrupted with benign irritation.

‘Yeah, whatever,’ Ayanna said before Keith had a chance to speak, ‘and then just, erm, well,’ she glanced sidelong at Jazzy, ‘erm, just recently someone, erm, sent us something. Some newspapers. About a kid getting stabbed over in New Cross and about some other guy being mugged and beaten up. And there was a note with it too, look.’ She pulled the ‘DO NOT DISTURB’ note from her pocket and proffered it to Keith. He looked at it and nodded slowly, his face giving away nothing, but he did not take it from her. Ayanna put the note away and continued, ‘And we don’t know these people, any of them, not the girl in the birth certificate or these two people who got hurt. And we don’t think Mack knows them either. We don’t know what the hell’s going on but we thought you might.’ She paused for breath, but only briefly. ‘So? Do you?’

Jazzy had been watching Keith’s face carefully throughout Ayanna’s blurted speech, wishing he had paid more attention to all those CSI-type programmes Petra was so fond of. Did Keith seem nervous? Suspicious? Twitchy? Trying to play it cool? Was it looking up and to the right that meant they were guilty, or down and to the left?

Watching Keith though, Jazzy was forced to assume that either the guy was a Cumberbatch-standard actor or that he was genuinely baffled, and also starting to get worried. His eyes had narrowed, the frown-lines in his high forehead had deepened and he cleared his throat several times, harshly and reflexively, as though choking back words he could not bring himself to say.

After a moment’s tense silence Keith spoke, his voice quieter and softer than before and hence, somehow, vastly more intimidating. ‘I don’t know, darling. I don’t know what the hell’s going on and I don’t know where your precious Mack’s gone either. I think it’s time you were going, don’t you?’ This last part was addressed to Jazzy. Keith gestured to the door, palm open, a smile utterly devoid of human emotion on his face, as though he was trying to pretend that this was a normal way to treat people who came to your house. Jazzy noticed that the older man’s hand was shaking.

Jazzy could see that Keith was rattled, but he could also see that they were categorically not going to glean anything further by staying here any longer. He opened his mouth to assent, in fact was already halfway out of his seat, when Ayanna leapt up from the chair arm. ‘Hang on though. I need the toilet first. Is that OK?’ She jutted her small chin out and met Keith’s gaze as though daring him to refuse.

That chilling smile again. ‘Course, darling. Just down the hall, first door on your left.’ He gestured to the door once more, and Jazzy noticed that the tremor had calmed slightly.

One thing, perhaps the only thing, Jazzy had learned from the slick American crime dramas that never seemed to be off his TV screen and always prevented him from catching up on Game of Thrones, was to go for the jugular when the suspect’s guard was down. He had brought the newspapers from the kitchen table with him and he got them out and shoved them towards Keith. ‘These don’t mean anything to you?’ he asked bluntly, and Keith barely glanced at them before shaking his head.

‘Nah,’ he said dismissively, and Jazzy knew he was lying. He felt a pulse of anger rise through his exhausted body, fired by the whisky that was just starting to kick in. How could Keith watch them sweat like this, desperate to find and help their friend for no reason other than that they cared? What kind of a human was he?

‘You know that birth certificate Ayanna said we found in Mack’s flat?’ Jazzy pressed on, determined to try and eke some drop of truth out of Keith’s desiccated heart.

‘Yeah,’ Keith said flatly, and this time, Jazzy realised, his reaction was entirely different. This time the man sounded like Jazzy felt; baffled, defeated, angry at being presented with pile after pile of information which made no sense. Jazzy even thought he could detect an icy fringe of fear to Keith’s tone. ‘I told you, son. I don’t know nothing about any birth certificate. I know what you lot think of me, I know you think I’m some low-rent cross between Del Boy and Ronnie and Reggie, but I ain’t no fucking people smuggler.’

‘I know,’ Jazzy said feebly, although they both must surely know that he knew no such thing. He was quietly impressed though, as well as infuriated, at how able Keith was to see himself as others saw him. Maybe that was the key to his success.

‘I may not have always played everything straight down the line but I’ve always made sure that my business don’t hurt nobody,’ Keith went on, his voice growing louder now, the throat clearing stopped.

‘I know,’ Jazzy said again, again neither of them being fully sure he meant it. ‘That’s not what I was trying to ask. What I wanted to know was, does the name on the birth certificate mean anything to you?’

Keith shrugged. ‘Dunno, do I? Wouldn’t have thought so, though. Why, what was the name?’

‘Jessica Novak,’ Jazzy responded quickly, trying to avoid Keith having time to prepare his face. He had been right to do so, he realised as soon as the words were out of his mouth. In the part-second before he was able to compose his features Keith’s eyes widened and his lips parted as though about to call for help. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.

‘No,’ Keith said quickly, his voice slightly too loud. ‘Nope.’ He shook his head. ‘Never heard that name before. Sounds foreign to me doesn’t it?’

Jazzy shrugged. ‘I suppose so. It sounds Polish or something to me.’

Keith shrugged. He had turned towards the door so that Jazzy could not see his face. ‘Dunno, all sound the same to me these foreign names.’ He turned back so he was facing Jazzy again. There was a finality in his tone.

‘And you don’t know why Mack would want this birth certificate?’

Keith looked at him for a moment. ‘Why would anyone want someone else’s birth certificate?’

Jazzy could feel the blank mind, the bright white light, taking over again.
Keep it together
, he told himself. Determined not to let Keith see his confusion he said, his tone as aggressive as he could manage. ‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.’

At that moment Ayanna burst back into the room. She had been gone ages, Jazzy realised. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said brightly. ‘I’m feeling a lot better now though.’

Keith did not try to disguise his distaste, but stood up, opened the door and held out an arm towards the hallway. It was about as polite as a ‘please get out of my house’ gesture ever could be.

Jazzy had heard enough stories about Keith in his heyday to not want to be around him when he stopped being polite. ‘Yes, we’d better go,’ he said flatly, following Keith to the door. He shoved his shoes on as quickly as he could. ‘Sorry to have troubled you.’

‘No problem, son. You just let me know, won’t you, when you hear anything from our boy?’

As Jazzy walked back down the gravel ‘drive’, the gates opened before him. He looked back at the house to see if he could pinpoint Keith’s vantage point, but in fact Keith was standing in plain view in the bay window of the living room. He was speaking into his phone, and as he saw Jazzy turning to look at him, he raised one hand in a solemn, unsmiling salute.

After they had left Keith’s street and turned back towards the station Ayanna suddenly stood with her back to the neatly trimmed privet of one of the many spruce bungalows and reached down the back of her trousers. With a wince she pulled a folded piece of paper out and proffered it to Jazzy.

‘Ugh, what are you doing?’ He backed away.

‘I found it,’ she said, barely able to contain her excitement, ‘when I went to the toilet. I didn’t even really need to go,’ she said as though excusing oneself to the toilet without any real need was the most daring thing a person could do. ‘So I went for a nosy. There’s a little room at the back near the kitchen that I reckon he’ll tell people is his study, but actually it’s just a little cupboard with half a window and a shelf full of golf trophies.’

Jazzy could not help but smile. He was finding it quite easy to picture the room as described.

‘Anyway, it did have a desk though, and a few drawers under it so I had a quick look through them.’ Ayanna said this as though she had done merely what any sane and right-thinking person would do. ‘To be honest there wasn’t much in them. I reckon he’s one of them men that thinks of looking after the paperwork as his wife’s job, don’t you?’