Find My Way Home Page 2

‘With me, I meant.’

  ‘I didn’t think you meant with my mum.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘What?’

  She was making me pay for the delay.

  ‘Fancy a drink?’

  ‘Are you going to beat up any of my friends this time?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to do it last time.’

  ‘It’s OK. He was asking for it.’

  ‘Does he bear a grudge?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. He’s gone to pastures new.’

  ‘So do you?’ I wondered if we’d have to go round the houses again, but we didn’t.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘When?’

  ‘Whenever you’re free.’

  ‘I’m free tonight.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Same place, six o’clock.’ I assumed she meant the pub where we’d first met.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I said.

  And I was. So was she, and she looked every bit as good as I remembered, and I told her the long story over a drink or two, followed by dinner, then I saw her into a cab to Liverpool Street Station. We met again three nights later, and that time she didn’t make it to the station. We’ve been seeing each other off and on since then. Nothing serious. I couldn’t handle that, and she knows why, and makes allowances. I’m grateful for that. Grateful for almost anything these days, since my wife was murdered. It takes some getting over, does that. I suppose it’s the same when a woman’s husband is murdered too, and I saw the pain in Nancy’s eyes when she said, ‘So will you help me?’

  ‘I don’t know. Whoever cut him up into pieces meant business.’ Slight understatement there.

  ‘You scared?’

  ‘’Course I am.’

  ‘But I need your help. And you owe me something, surely, after all we’ve been through.’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  She shrugged helplessly. ‘Then you owe Harry. Or at least his memory.’

  ‘Do I?’

  She was close to tears by then and she said, ‘Or maybe because you owe yourself.’

  I thought about that for a bit. ‘Maybe I do,’ I said.

  And looking at Nancy again I suddenly felt very sorry for her and said, ‘OK, Nancy. I’ll see what I can do, but no promises.’

  Never feel sorry for people, especially old lovers. It’ll come back and do you up.

  It did with me anyway.

  ‘Tell me about the day he vanished,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve already told you. He left as usual for his office. At least I thought he did, until I found his car still in the garage when I got mine out to go shopping.’

  ‘When was this exactly?’

  ‘It was a Friday, almost thirteen months ago. A year before his body was found. Or at least most of it.’

  Delicate ground, but I had to ask if I was going to do anything for her. ‘No hint that anything was up?’

  ‘Not that I noticed. Not that I necessarily would. We were pretty much living apart under one roof by then.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘I called his office. I thought maybe the car wouldn’t start, and he’d got a cab off the street. 4F’s offices are just over the river in Putney.’

  ‘Why? If you weren’t getting on. Why did you bother?’

  ‘You’ve got to understand the circumstances, Nick. We weren’t at each other’s throats. He had his life, I had mine. Separate rooms, the whole bit. But we didn’t hate each other. We’d been through all that. Sometimes we even had a fuck for old times’ sake. It’s not unheard of, is it? It suited us both to stay living together, for a lot of reasons. I wanted to know if his mechanic was going to turn up to collect the Jag, and if Harry needed a lift home after work.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘I spoke to his secretary. She said he didn’t have any appointments until the afternoon, and she thought maybe he’d just taken the morning off.’

  ‘He could do things like that?’

  ‘He was a director by then. Director in charge of security. He could do more or less what he liked within reason.’

  Director in charge of security at a security firm. Nice work if you could get it. ‘Good job,’ I said.

  She nodded.

  ‘So what then?’

  ‘I asked her to get him to call as soon as he arrived. Then I found the car keys.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘I was a bit surprised. I told you he loved that car. But I assumed there was a good reason. Then after lunch his secretary called me. He’d missed his appointment and that was when I started to get a bit worried.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I found his address book and I called around a few of his friends. Golfing chums, that sort of thing. Nothing. By that evening I was starting to get . . . well, annoyed more than anything if you really want to know, and after I’d spoken to Harry’s secretary again and found out there’d been no sign of him, I talked to the managing director of 4F. He’d obviously heard that Harry hadn’t been into the office all day, and was as mystified as me. He came round that evening on the way home from work. That was when we went through his desk in the study and found his stuff and we decided to call the police.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘A couple of uniforms showed up about two hours later. When they realised who Harry was they called the station and a pair of CID came along. One of them knew Harry from the old days. They asked a lot of questions. I think at first they thought he might’ve run off with a bimbo, but the fact of who he was, and the fact that the MD of one of the top security firms in the country was there and was dropping the names of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and the Home Secretary kept them from saying it. I showed them what he’d left behind and they came up with the scenario that he’d been kidnapped and we’d get some kind of call from the kidnappers. You know the sort of thing. Give us the key to the vaults or he dies.’

  ‘But that didn’t happen.’

  ‘No. The police kept in close touch all weekend, then on Monday when nothing had happened they seemed to lose interest, and like I said, put him on the register of missing persons.’

  ‘And the firm?’

  ‘Much the same. They paid his salary for three months, then sent a polite letter telling me they wouldn’t pay it any more, plus a cheque for his pension contributions, and collected the car.’

  ‘And that was that?’

  ‘Until they found his body.’

  ‘But now the Old Bill must be bopping.’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice.’

  Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice, I thought.

  ‘But he’s been murdered. Christ, he was in the bloody job.’ I scratched my head and lit another cigarette. ‘What was the cause of death, by the way?’

  ‘Apart from being chopped into dog food, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, Nancy. Apart from that.’

  ‘He was tortured, then beaten to death.’

  ‘Shit. Sorry. I didn’t read that in the papers.’

  ‘It hasn’t been in the papers.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There hasn’t been a formal verdict on the inquest yet. It was adjourned. The same copper who knew Harry before told me that off the record.’

  ‘This is all very odd.’

  ‘You can say that again. Do you think you can do anything, Nick? It’s not so much the murder I want you to solve as to find out what he’d been up to since he left.’

  ‘Seems to me they’re pretty much one and the same.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Anything could’ve happened. But you’re a man, and used to be in the job yourself. You’ll probably have better luck at getting information out of people than I have.’

  ‘I can try,’ I said. ‘But I tell you now, Nancy, I’m not getting too involved with people who’ll torture some poor sod, beat him to death, then cut him up and distribute the pieces all over the shop. I’m trying to give
up dangerous sports.’

  ‘You must be getting old, Nick,’ she said, and crossed her legs again.

  Not as old as all that I thought as I watched her hemline move up her thighs.

  ‘But you will try?’

  ‘I’ll have a sniff round. Just for you and Harry.’

  ‘I’ve got something in here to sweeten the pot,’ she said. She opened her handbag and got out a thick brown envelope, and handed it to me. I opened it. It was packed with twenty-pound notes.

  ‘A grand,’ she said. ‘Should keep you in whatever your poison is these days for a while.’

  ‘Should do,’ I said. ‘You obviously aren’t short.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘You’ve convinced me. Give me the name of your pet cop and the managing director of 4F, and I’ll do a little nosing around next week.’

  In fact, I was quite looking forward to it. It had been too long.

  She gave me the information I’d asked for, and I promised to report in as soon as I found out anything.

  She told me I should come round for dinner one night.

  I agreed. I wanted to have a shufti round the gaff anyway, and the sound of her nylon-covered legs on top of each other had been getting to me.

  Mug punter.

  As a matter of fact I was seeing Diane that very night, so I mooched the rest of the day away at my office, thinking about what I’d bitten off by agreeing to try and find out what had happened to Harry Stonehouse’s lost year.

  I’d meant what I’d said about not partaking of dangerous sports any more, and the more I thought, the more I realised I might be getting into hazardous waters. Might? More like undoubtedly would, and by the time I left to meet Diane, I had more or less convinced myself to knock the whole thing on the head, let Nancy know what I’d decided, and give her back the money she’d paid me.

  I caught a bus to Blackfriars and walked up into Clerkenwell, where I was due to meet Diane. I told her what had happened but didn’t mention my past relationship with Nancy, or indeed that she’d managed to blow some oxygen on to the embers I’d thought were long dead. I didn’t feel much commitment to Diane and I doubted that she did to me. She’d had her choice and decided to stick around. That was good, but I didn’t want any proper relationship, and if she did, that was just too bad. Not a nice attitude, but that was all I could muster. Even so I thought it better to keep shtum.

  We ate in a Korean restaurant in Holborn. Why it stayed open in the evening I’ll never know, because the area had emptied out by then, and the few times we’d eaten there before we’d rarely seen any other customers.

  It was like that that evening. Being the only two punters in the place, we got our favourite table by the window where we could look out on the traffic heading back and forth across the viaduct.

  ‘It’s good to see you interested in something at last,’ said Diane, helping herself to some fried noodles in soup, with beef.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied, chewing on a prawn in chilli sauce. ‘But I don’t know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Whether or not to go through with it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I almost choked on the prawn’s tail. ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Because, like I told you, they’re still looking for some bits of Harry, and I don’t want to be the next one turning up in black plastic sacks in the back of a garbage truck.’

  ‘But she told you she doesn’t want you to find out who killed him. Just what he’d been up to since he left.’

  ‘And of course there’s no connection. Come on, Diane, give me a break.’

  ‘Well, it’s up to you. But I hate seeing you wasting your life away like you’ve been doing.’

  ‘I work,’ I said defensively.

  ‘About once in a blue moon. What work have you done lately?’

  ‘I was looking for that bloke’s car.’ A classic Jaguar that had been pinched from outside his house in Dulwich. The police had had no luck, and he called me in. But from the few whispers I’d picked up, it had long gone to Dubai or one of the Emirates by the time I came in on the case.

  ‘And I’ve done some process serving.’

  Diane sniffed.

  ‘And there was the bloke who thought his brother had nicked his credit cards.’ Just where we came in.

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Diane. ‘And all that in – how long? Four months, is it?’

  ‘Things are quiet.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘OK, Diane, I give in. I don’t really want the job. Right now. Any job. At least any job that’s going to show a degree of risk.’

  ‘You take a risk every morning when you get up.’

  ‘Which is why I like to sleep in till after lunch.’

  ‘Terrific, Nick. That’s a really great attitude.’

  I started to get the hump then.

  ‘Who are you to tell me about my attitude?’ I said nastily.

  ‘Just a friend.’

  ‘Well. As one friend to another, mind your own damn business.’

  I could see I’d hurt her then. She swallowed hard and started to get her stuff together.

  I felt like a bastard. ‘Diane,’ I said, grabbing her hand. ‘Don’t go. I’m sorry. That was a shitty thing to say. I appreciate what you said. I really do.’

  ‘And?’

  I shook my head. She knew she had me cold. ‘And I’ll see what I can do. Earn the dough she’s given me, and then fuck off.’

  Famous last words.

  The following Monday morning I decided to start with Nancy’s tame copper, DI Bell, who I’d never come across before, and I hoped the experience was mutual. If it hadn’t been for him I wouldn’t have known where to begin, all my contacts on the force being dead, retired or of the opinion that I was somewhere south of a snake’s belly on the professional front.

  I put in a call to Fulham Police Station around ten-thirty.

  ‘DI Bell,’ I said to the male voice that answered the phone.

  There was a click and a gruff voice said: ‘Bell.’

  ‘Morning, Inspector,’ I said. ‘My name’s Sharman. I’m a private enquiry agent working for Nancy Stonehouse.’

  There was a pause that seemed to stretch the length of the Fulham Road, if not all the way into Knightsbridge.

  ‘Not Nick Sharman,’ he said eventually.

  Obviously he had heard of me.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Is this some sort of a joke?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why would Nancy Stonehouse hire you?’

  ‘We’re old friends. I was a friend of Harry’s too.’

  ‘Christ. This is all I need.’

  A most auspicious start.

  ‘I wondered if we might meet.’

  ‘Keep on wondering.’

  ‘I’m only trying to do my job.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Finding out what happened to Harry during the year he was missing.’

  ‘And what do you think I’m doing? Making daisy chains to earn my money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I believe you’re trying to find out who killed him.’

  ‘Very good, Sharman. We’ll make a copper of you yet. And I suppose you might have noticed that there could be some common thread between his disappearance and his death?’

  ‘Sure. But I don’t want to get involved in the murder.’

  ‘Don’t you? Well, I’m amazed. I thought murder was your business.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Don’t piss about, Sharman,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but I intend to find out.’

  ‘It’s simple—’

  ‘Sez you,’ he interrupted. ‘I’m going to speak to Mrs Stonehouse. You got a number there?’

  I gave it to him.

  ‘I’ll call you back. And one thing. Don’t step on my toes, son, or you’ll wish you hadn’t.’ And with that he slammed the phone down.

>   I sat holding the dead instrument for a moment, then replaced it carefully on its base and lit a cigarette.

  Next I tried 4F. The managing director’s name was David Sutton, and he was in a meeting. So was his assistant. And his assistant’s assistant probably, but I didn’t ask. I told whoever I was talking to that I’d call back.

  Productive morning so far.

  The phone rang about five minutes later. It was Nancy.

  ‘I’ve just had Philip Bell on the phone. He’s furious.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know. I had a little chat with him myself, earlier.’

  ‘He wants you off the case.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘I told him I wanted you to carry on.’

  ‘What did he say to that?’

  ‘Not a lot.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he hung up on me.’

  ‘Me too. I hope he’s watching his blood pressure.’

  ‘You won’t stop, Nick, will you?’

  ‘I haven’t properly started yet.’

  ‘But you’ll carry on.’

  ‘I took your money.’

  ‘Thanks. When are we going to get together?’

  I could almost hear her nylons rasping together over the phone. ‘Name a day.’

  ‘Tomorrow. Dinner. Seven o’clock.’

  ‘Sounds good. Just one thing. I don’t have your address.’

  She gave it to me and I jotted it down. Then we made our farewells and I put down the phone. It rang immediately. It was Bell.

  ‘Seems like you’re well in there,’ he said.

  ‘Look, I—’

  He didn’t let me finish. ‘Just keep out of my way and you’ll be all right,’ he barked. ‘Otherwise you’re in deep shit,’ and he hung up again.

  So much for cooperation.

  I tried 4F again and got through to David Sutton’s assistant fresh from the meeting.

  I went through the preamble, and enquired if I could come over and see Sutton.

  ‘His book’s pretty full,’ said the assistant. A female. Once upon a time she would probably have been called his secretary.

  ‘It won’t take long.’

  ‘Tomorrow at four?’

  ‘Suits me.’

  And that was how it started.

  At four o’clock precisely the next afternoon I presented myself, all washed and neatly combed, at the glass and concrete palace hidden discreetly away behind a small wood on the edge of the residential area of Putney that housed the offices of 4F Security Inc.