Then You Were Gone (21 page)

They had come back
. That was his first thought, the only thing that made sense to him. Whoever it was that had been in his house last night, who had left those papers on the dining room table, who had carved a hole in his front door, they were back now for whatever it was they wanted, and the fact that the daylight had not scared them away only made their being there more sinister.

Or, and he was unsure whether this thought was more or less terrifying, it could be Keith. He could have realised that they had taken the letter and had come to ask for it back. Or to scare them off for good.

He flattened himself against the living room wall and glanced sideways through the window, wishing that he was of a class and a generation for whom lace curtains were acceptable, but as the figure at the doorway took a step back and gave the door a hard shove, banging it against the small bookcase he had dragged against it at four a.m., he huffed out a heavy sigh of relief. It was not a thick-set man in a fake leather jacket, nor was it a mean, skinny youth with an earring and an air of menace, and nor was it Keith. It was Simone.

Treading softly so as not to wake Ayanna, Jazzy went into the hall and moved the bookcase away from the door, then reached through the hole and pulled it open. Simone blinked at him in puzzlement. ‘What’s happened?’ she said by way of greeting, indicating the damaged door.

‘Come in,’ Jazzy beckoned, holding the door shut with his foot while he dragged the bookcase back into place. ‘I’ll tell you in a minute. Where have you been anyway?’

She looked exhausted, her face pale, her hair lank and in need of a wash. The skin around her eyes was puffy and raw, as though she had spent a long time crying. ‘Looking for Mack,’ she said hoarsely, as though Jazzy didn’t already know that. ‘But I didn’t find him.’ She followed Jazzy into the lounge, then stopped in the doorway as she spotted Ayanna snoring on the couch under a three hundred quid mohair throw. ‘Jazzy,’ she said, her tone at once more wary and more urgent. ‘What is going on?’

He indicated for her to sit in one of the armchairs on either side of the bay window, then told her, in a whisper, what had brought him and Ayanna to this point – the man coming to her college, the noises in the night, the carved up door and the newspapers left on the table with a note. By the time he had searched the house from top to bottom, he explained, while Ayanna shivered by the back door, it was four a.m. He had secured the front door as best he could.

‘What, you mean utterly ineptly?’ Simone put in with a bleak smile and Jazzy gave her the finger.

Then, he continued, the two of them had fallen asleep some time before dawn here in the front room with the TV still on. He reached into his back pocket for Keith’s letter, bracing himself to explain this latest twist in their unfathomable quest, but before he could speak Simone took the newspapers and the note that Jazzy had indicated earlier, frowning with incomprehension. The note was on a plain piece of A4 paper, printed in smudgy, cheap ink in block capitals, the words several inches high:
DO NOT DISTURB
. ‘What’s this?’ she asked, and Jazzy gestured to the newspapers.

‘Read that.’

Both newspapers were folded back to display an inside page. The national broadsheet was an old one from a couple of months previously, folded open to a page containing one long single article, entitled
Teenager dead in minicab office stabbing.
It was accompanied by a school photograph of a teenage boy, Aaron Hodder, smirking rather than smiling, his school tie loosened and his hair gelled up into an enormous quiff.

The tabloid was a South London local freesheet, folded open to a page containing a few small articles and classified announcements. The biggest article on the page, and the only one accompanied by a photo, related to two bank workers who were cycling to John O’Groats and back to raise money for a colleague’s new electronic wheelchair. Simone shook her head in irritation and looked to him in a ‘What the hell?’ manner.

‘No,’ Jazzy said softly, and pointed to one of the smaller articles at the bottom of the page. Whoever had left the newspaper had circled the article in red.
Father-to-be hospitalised after street attack
, the headline read. The following couple of lines outlined the upsetting but essentially unremarkable story of a twenty-year-old man named Marcus Lovatt (a father-to-be, as the journalist kept reiterating) who had been mugged on his way home from the pub one evening and ended up in hospital with a broken rib and what were rather sinisterly described as ‘facial injuries’.

Simone squinted at him in irritation and bafflement. ‘I know,’ Jazzy whispered. ‘Me neither. This though,’ he pointed to the broadsheet, ‘I do remember reading about. It was south of the river somewhere; New Cross I think. A fight or something in a minicab office one night and one of the kids involved got stabbed to death. I remember it because he was only a kid; seventeen or so. And so was the guy who did it.’

‘They caught the guy who did it?’ Simone’s irritation had apparently turned to bleak confusion, and Jazzy, remembering his own frustrating episodes of roaring empty-mindedness, could sympathise. She sat back in the chair and closed her eyes, as though the sheer amount of thinking she was being required to do was causing her physical pain.

Jazzy gave a non-committal gesture, as if to say the truth was not quite so simple. He crept over to where Ayanna lay, still gently snoring, and picked his laptop up from the side table.

‘We looked them up last night,’ he said, firing the machine up, ‘after we read all that stuff.’

Simone sat up and opened her eyes with visible effort. ‘OK,’ she said, although whether to him or to herself Jazzy could not tell.

‘There were obviously loads of witnesses to this,’ he indicated the broadsheet article. ‘You know, a minicab office at half eleven on a Friday night; there were apparently three or four other people in the waiting room, plus the woman working the phones. She was the one who called the ambulance. But then, when you look through the news articles over the week or so after it happened, it’s pretty obvious that nobody who was there – and remember this was in a tiny little minicab office under one of those horrible fluorescent lights they all have – none of these people were apparently able to identify the kid who did it.’

‘What, they’d been scared off?’

Jazzy shrugged. ‘That’s what it looks like. There are several statements from the police saying stuff like,
we urge you to do the right thing
and banging on about how their anonymity will be protected.’

Simone pulled a face. ‘Not a great deal of help though, is it? Like you said, there were only about four other people in the place. Whoever did it would know who it was who shopped him to the police. You can’t blame them for keeping quiet.’

‘Well,’ Jazzy said, ‘that’s as may be, but obviously one of them fronted up in the end because,’ he flipped open the laptop and turned the screen so it was facing Simone, ‘it says here, about a fortnight after it happened, they arrested an eighteen-year-old local lad called Connor Marston, and a couple of days later he was charged with murder. He’s on remand now, waiting for the trial.’

He watched Simone absorb the details as she studied the photograph of the young kid who was now looking at spending the rest of his youth, and possibly his early middle age, on the high security wing of various prisons. He looked ludicrously young in the photo, no sign of stubble on his pale cheeks or upper lip, his eyes hooded in a creepy smirk. ‘Looks a right charmer, doesn’t he?’

Simone laughed humourlessly and closed her eyes again. ‘But…’ she said, then puffed out a heavy sigh and did not continue.

Jazzy knew what she wanted to say. ‘But why did someone come into my house at night and leave this here?’

Simone nodded without opening her eyes, then ran a hand down her face.

‘I haven’t got a fucking clue,’ he said truthfully. ‘We were up all night, me and Ayanna, googling everything we could think of to do with this case, the kid who got killed, the kid who killed him, the minicab firm, that part of London, everything.’

‘And you came up with nothing?’ Simone had her eyes open now, her tone flat and defeated.

‘Nothing to speak of. Nothing that made anything any clearer.’

‘You know that’s where Mack’s mum lives?’ Simone said, nodding towards the local freesheet. ‘I went to her flat, it’s in New Cross. That’s the area Mack grew up in.’

Jazzy nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I do know. And this must be it,’ he jabbed the article about the murdered boy, ‘this must be something to do with Mack, something to do with why he’s gone. Does he go to his mum’s much?’

Simone screwed up her face as though revealing an unpleasant truth. ‘I don’t think so. I mean, I’d only ever met her once until I went round there the other day, and it was obvious when me and Mack went out with her that that was the first time he’d been to see her since he’d started seeing me. And I don’t remember him ever saying he was going to see her. Although,’ she said in a resigned tone, ‘that certainly doesn’t mean he hadn’t been to see her. I mean, I think it’s pretty clear that he’s been doing something we don’t know about. I just wish we knew what.’

Jazzy felt relieved to hear her say ‘we’ like that. She had been acting a bit off with him, as though her anger at Mack for buggering off on her was being transferred (very unfairly as he saw it) onto Jazzy. He was glad to hear some evidence that she still felt they were on the same side. ‘So you don’t think there’s any chance Mack could have been in that minicab office that night?’

Simone grabbed the broadsheet. ‘When was it?’ She studied the date in the article, then fished her phone out of her bag.

‘Do you use the calendar on your phone?’ he asked, unable to keep the surprise out of his tone.

‘Yes I use the fucking calendar on my phone, Jazzy, I’m not a fucking imbecile you know.’ She scrolled through her phone, not making eye contact with him and not smiling to indicate she had been only joking, then she shook her head. ‘Nope. I’ve got it in here, we went to see a band at a pub in Islington that night. They finished late then we both stayed over at mine, I remember.’ Jazzy did not ask what it was about their sleepover that had been memorable.

Jazzy pushed his fists into his eye sockets and ground them in, as though he could force some spark of inspiration into his brain that way. He blinked and looked around him. Ayanna stirred in her sleep and turned her head. Her hair was plastered to the side of her face. He saw Simone glance at her, then shift uncomfortably. Surely Simone couldn’t think that of him, that he would go behind Petra’s back, that he’d have sex with a teenager while his wife and baby were away? ‘And he never said anything to you about having been to New Cross, knowing anyone there, anything?’

‘No, Jazzy,’ that narky tone again, ‘I would have remembered, and if it had happened to slip my mind then I think that this,’ she gave a sweeping gesture to indicate the scale of the madness in which they were now embroiled, ‘would probably have jogged my memory, don’t you think?’

Jazzy could think of nothing to say that would not result in an argument, so he said nothing.

‘And who’s this guy?’ Simone went on, picking up the freesheet article about the young mugging victim. ‘What the fuck’s he got to do with all of this?’ Her tone was now verging on the hysterical.

‘We don’t know,’ Jazzy said. ‘We googled him too, of course, but there was nothing on him apart from the fact that he recently got mugged and put in hospital. We found him on Facebook and stuff, but that’s it.’

‘Can I see?’ Simone asked quickly, in the manner of a drowning person clutching at a deflated life raft.

‘Um, OK.’ Jazzy brought up the young man’s Facebook profile that he and Ayanna had studied to little effect in the early hours. His name was Marcus Lovatt; not all of his profile was visible, but there were a large number of photos, mostly of him and a strikingly pretty young woman, black-haired and blue-eyed and, in the more recent photos, visibly pregnant. His place of work was listed as Yellowhammer Logistics, his job title was the seemingly meaningless Team Member. He had longish hair and a shortish beard, a kind, round face and a sweet smile. He did not look like someone who deserved to be mugged, he did not look like someone who would have been in any trouble in his life and, crucially, he did not look like someone who Jazzy or Simone or Mack would have ever had anything to do with.

Simone clicked on his profile picture, one of the ones with him and the stunning woman who was presumably his girlfriend. As the cursor hovered over the young woman’s face, two words popped up: Jessica Novak. Simone gave a small gasp, moved the mouse, then moved it back again. The same name popped up. She took an involuntary step back from the laptop and looked at Jazzy. ‘Jazz,’ she said urgently, and he hated himself for feeling pleased to hear in her voice that she needed him again. ‘Jazz, are you seeing what I’m seeing?’

He nodded and reached again to his back pocket for Keith’s letter. ‘Yes. And there’s something else you need to see.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

‘She’s real,’ Simone breathed, not really aware whether she was speaking aloud or not. It had not occurred to her, she now realised, that Jessica Novak could be a real girl, a real smiling girl with blue eyes and beautiful teeth and a baby growing inside her. In Simone’s mind she had become a spectre, a doppelganger, a non-person that could be magicked into being if the situation required. She was the new identity of someone who had fled their old life and their old country; she was a scared half-grown woman in the back of a blacked-out Mercedes semi-conscious from the tranquilisers she was being fed. The name Jessica Novak, the weight of her birth certificate which was still in Simone’s bag, had been something that haunted her ever since she first saw the name etched in fountain pen on a red-bordered rectangle of cream paper, the name a cipher for the worst case scenario. ‘She’s a real girl,’ she said to Jazzy, her tone almost joyful.

He nodded. ‘She is real. And obviously she’s right here on Facebook. I don’t know why we didn’t think to look for her online before. I mean, what kind of seventeen-year-old girl isn’t on Facebook?’