Hell Is Empty Page 5

Little circles over every ‘i’ and ‘j’. Every ‘O’ contained a smiley face. You’d think you’d grow out of that shit. Given the content, you’d maybe call it a day. Bottle-green jumper. Grey A-line skirt.

  Karen Leonard.

  I said her name aloud. We’d had a bit of a thing for each other, in as much as two thirteen–year-olds can have a thing. We’d snogged at a Golden Oldies school disco. Christ. ‘I Got You’ by Split Enz. ‘Baggy Trousers’. ‘Geno’. I remember she kept her eyes open. A couple of years later, after O levels, she and her family moved away. I don’t remember where or why or even if she told me; it happened fast. Maybe it was Marbella. She was back now though. And impatient.

  I folded the note and put it in my pocket. I spent most of the day reading and rereading it, and remembering the author. I lost hours to reminiscences about old friends, and teachers, and school corridors we had walked. The people we were. The people we leave behind. The people we become. I thought of Sarah, and all the relationships – short-term and enduring – that she must have nurtured in the years since she left home.

  I could see The Beehive from my bedroom window; it spooked me a little to think that she’d chosen a meeting place so close to where I lived. The letter was dated yesterday, which meant that this ‘baby boy’ had been gone forty-eight hours at least. But surely she’d been to the police. Surely he’d have been reunited with her by now? Of course. Surely. Those words spent scant time in my vocabulary before being replaced by ‘oh shit’ and ‘bollocks’ and ‘fuck me’.

  I checked my watch. An hour until I needed to be where she threatened to be. I looked around the flat and wondered if I should bring her back, away from the optics and the taps. But no. Too much water under the bridge, most of it polluted.

  It didn’t stop me from putting a bit of effort into what I chose to wear. An old flame always carried a little heat; we’d liked each other back in the day. A lot, as I recalled – at least on my part – but then I was and still am a sucker for anything even halfway female.

  I ironed a shirt. I put on clean socks. I didn’t polish my boots but at least I kind of thought about it. I was at The Beehive at seven on the dot and spotted her straight away, mainly because The Beehive is a tiny boozer and there was nobody else in there. She was Karen Leonard all right, but then she kind of wasn’t either. And it hurt because it reminded me that I didn’t look as lean or as carefree as I might once have done, and that if you saw time caught up in the hair of a contemporary, then you could be painfully certain that it was caught up in your own as well.

  Perhaps she saw some of that disappointment in my face and shook hands with some of her own, or was it that she thought I looked like so much backcombed shit? It was conceivable that I always had and that’s why she legged it when we were young.

  Maybe that night of the Golden Oldies school disco she only kissed me because she mistook me for Snogger Jackson, who was just like me but with added looks, charm and muscles.

  ‘Sp-aren,’ I said, hoping she hadn’t noticed. Spanish was hardly a pejorative nickname, but I never knew if it irritated her so better to play safe.

  ‘Soz,’ she said. Her hair was short now, and shot through with threads of grey that she’d dyed at some point in recent weeks but now the colour, a red of some sort, was growing out. She wore a scuffed biker jacket over a Star Wars T-shirt and skin-tight jeans. There was a dusting of make-up on her but it was slapdash, as if it was something she didn’t do too often, if at all.

  ‘I got your letter,’ I said.

  ‘Well, yeah.’ Something was in her, gnawing at her. It wasn’t the loss of gloss, or the accretion of years that was dragging her down. And it wasn’t this business of the child. You don’t look like this in twenty-four hours. It was something else. Drugs. Drink. Instant coffee. I don’t know.

  ‘Something about a boy,’ I said. ‘Something about a kidnap.’

  ‘Something about my boy,’ she said.

  ‘What’s going on? You reported this to the police, didn’t you?’ Knowing full well…

  ‘I can’t report it to the police, Soz,’ she said. ‘I’m not supposed to have a baby.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  She sipped from her glass. Not Guinness and black. Gold Label barley wine. Strong as a double Scotch, less than half the price, as the old ad used to go.

  ‘I was on the run with Simon because he was going to be taken away from me.’

  ‘So you’re on the run… and he’s been taken away from you anyway.’

  ‘Kidnapped,’ she said. ‘There’s a difference. If I’d stayed where I was staying then social services would have had him.’

  ‘Maybe it’s social services who took him now,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be a jerk, Soz. That’s not how it works, and you know it.’

  ‘Where were you staying?’

  ‘I was living in a B&B in Mablethorpe,’ she said. ‘Scrounging as many benefits as I could.’

  ‘How refreshingly honest,’ I said.

  ‘It was just me and Simon. Olly had done a bunk. Cliché dad who wants his freedom after chucking his muck.’

  ‘So what happened with social services?’

  ‘I took Simon to the GP. He was crying and wouldn’t sleep. Feverish. He had swellings on his wrists and ankles. I had to take him for X-rays and they found multiple fractures. They were there within minutes, like fucking vultures, waiting to whisk him off.’

  ‘And you legged it?’

  ‘Too fucking right. I never did nothing. I read up on it. It was my fault, kind of, but not because I smacked him or anything like that. I breastfed him.’

  ‘And your enormous norks crushed his tiny limbs to bone dust.’

  ‘Funny. Apparently there isn’t much vitamin D in breast milk—’

  ‘What about vitamin double-D?’

  ‘Soz, this isn’t a joke. My little boy… he had rickets.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Karen, but my bullshit monitor is flashing red at the moment. We’re sitting here in the pub and your baby boy is God knows where and you look about as frantic as a sloth on tranqs.’

  ‘I am on tranqs,’ she said. ‘I took fifteen milligrams of diazepam this morning and this is my second beer. I look like I couldn’t give a shit but inside I’m ripped apart. If I wasn’t taking the edge off I’d be climbing the walls.’

  ‘So who’s got him? And why?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s why I came to you.’

  ‘You think it might be this Olly?’

  ‘It could be,’ she said, but she had seized upon the answer as if it had never occurred to her before, which it must have.

  ‘Even though he’d never shown any interest before? He left when? When you told him you were pregnant?’

  ‘No. After he’d knobbed me. He fucked off to Aberdeen to find work on the rigs.’

  ‘So he didn’t even know you were pregnant?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound promising, does it? Who else? Any grudges?’

  ‘Does the Pope shit in the woods?’

  ‘Make me a list,’ I said, and handed her my notebook. ‘Addresses would be helpful. While I get you another drink.’

  I stood at the bar and shook my head when the landlord, a guy called Mike who wore waistcoats, made to pour me a Kronenbourg.

  ‘I’m off the pop, mate,’ I said.

  ‘Course you are,’ he said.

  ‘No, really, I am,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ he said.

  ‘Pour me one for my friend,’ I told him. ‘But not another can of falling-over juice. Make it half a shandy.’

  ‘It’ll be like piss after what she’s been supping,’ he warned me, but he poured the drink and I paid and I left him with a hard stare.

  She’d written me a list. It was long. I went through it with her and crossed off the names of those who she hadn’t seen for over two years or those who had families. In my experience, any level of ‘settled down’ has a dissipatin
g effect on the red mist. There were five names left.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘This is more manageable. Who is Tommy Hulce?’

  ‘He’s an old trick,’ she said. ‘I did him out of a ton one night.’

  ‘He local?’

  ‘He was. He died last year. Motorbike accident.’

  I looked at her. ‘So we could probably cross him off the list?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Anybody else you fear might be harassing you from beyond the grave?’

  ‘Soz, I know you think I’m just a stupid junk-head, but my head’s been scrambled by this. I’m fucked up. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Okay. Anyone else we can lose?’

  ‘Jeff Grealish,’ she said. ‘He died of cancer in 2012. Sorry. Not thinking straight.’

  ‘And then there were three.’

  She told me about the names that remained. Two of them – Toby Fletcher and Imran Raza – were a couple of pissheads who’d recently suffered the same trick as the late Mr Hulce; she’d lifted their wallets while they lay comatose after a night of Drambuie and doggy style. She didn’t know anything about their domestic lives. Benjie Weston had been ‘the one’ for her, she told me. She’d been serious about him and to show her devotion hadn’t taken any of his money. But he was definitely married. She’d put pressure on him for a while to leave his wife and two sons and move in with her. When he told her to leave him alone she saw it as a challenge and intensified her pursuit of him.

  I stared at the names and tried to drum up some enthusiasm but it was difficult. I couldn’t make the mental leap required to swallow any of this. I wondered if I was meant to be the next sting on her rota, that this was just a part of her act to soften me up. Karen Leonard’s UK tour of gullible contacts.

  ‘I got in touch because you’re an old friend and I’m all out of old friends,’ she said, as if she were reading my mind. ‘I trust you. But I don’t have any money.’

  ‘Hey, come on,’ I said, thinking, Fuck’s sake. ‘Old friends don’t do it for the money.’

  8

  So I looked into these gullible prongs Karen had been shafting. Imran Raza lived in a small flat near Highbury, within the shadow of the Emirates Stadium. A Tottenham Hotspur football club flag was pinned defiantly to an upper window. I sat in the car watching, waiting. There was precious little else to do. I imagined Sarah sitting in a room somewhere, gnawing at her nails, wrestling with the urge to call me, to do the right thing, to help me apply the glue to the crack that separated us.

  Do it, I thought. And took my phone out, anticipating the call.

  At that moment, Raza appeared at the communal doorway. He was dressed in sweatshirt and jogging bottoms, spattered with old paint. He held a lunch box in his fist. A woman in a dressing gown clutched a baby to her waist and gave him a kiss goodbye. She looked frazzled, head nodding on the block wishing the sleep guillotine to fall. Money tight in that domicile, I thought. Rents here were high and there were mouths to feed.

  I put myself in Raza’s position. Would I go to the trouble of trying to shake down an ex-fuck because she fiddled me out of the thin wedge in my wallet? With a wife at home? I’d stand to lose everything. Unless the wife was in on it too and that nipper she was dandling turned out to be Karen’s child. I’d paint my bollocks with meat sauce and squat over the piranha pond if it was. He was heading along Drayton Park towards Arsenal Tube station. A day’s hard graft, providing for his family. I sauntered after him thinking no, this guy’s just glad to have got away with it. He’ll think twice before the knickers come off in future. Lesson learned.

  I watched him until we got to the station then mentally crossed him off my list. He wasn’t a kidnapper.

  An hour later and I’d found Toby Fletcher. He worked in an office in Pimlico. I sat in the coffee shop across the way on Belgrave Road, a busy little joint run by garrulous Italians who didn’t have a clue about decor but made a great cup of coffee. The breakfast crowd were in, ordering paninis and croissants. Fletcher came in an hour later to order a round of coffees. Again, I was unconvinced. He looked like someone who was mildly disgruntled by the fact that he’d been sent out on a beverage run. I squeezed past him. He was playing Plants vs. Zombies on his phone. I didn’t get the vibe from him – and I’ve felt it so many times – that he was blackmailing anybody. But unlike Raza, I hadn’t seen him with his family. That might be an indicator of his potential.

  But I waited until he had his hands full of cardboard and coffee before I challenged him about it.

  ‘You what?’ he said. He didn’t have a very pleasant mouth. His teeth were yellowish and furred, his tongue squirmed between them, grey and dry like a regurgitated chunk of meat.

  ‘I said, “Have you kidnapped any young children lately?”’

  He wore an expression that sat unhappily on his face, midway between bemusement – as if at some moment a camera would emerge from a hiding place to show he was the focus of an elaborate prank – and open hostility.

  ‘You fucking what?’

  Froth oozed from the holes in his plastic lids as if agitated by his rising temper.

  I’d already decided he was thicker than bull semen but I decided to see if he’d go for the hat trick. I asked him again.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  Disappointed that he’d changed tack, but he still hadn’t answered me, I decided to change tack too. I slammed my hand up into the tray of coffees and launched them into the air.

  He cried out and stepped back, lost his footing and went down on his arse. The drinks followed, an all-out macchiato attack. I offered him a pocket tissue but he was looking at me as if I was threatening to set off a nail bomb.

  I withdrew my phone and found the photograph of Karen I’d taken in The Beehive the previous evening.

  ‘What can you tell me about this woman?’ I said, fully expecting another question in return.

  His astonishment intensified under his mask of caffeinated milk and hot water.

  ‘You know her,’ I said. ‘I know her. I know what she did, I know what she’s capable of. What are you capable of?’

  ‘She fucked me over,’ he said. ‘Played me like a muppet. Pocketed the best part of a hundred quid.’

  ‘While you were sleeping?’

  He was opening up now; I think he thought I was a copper. All of the fight had, literally, puddled out of him.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘She spiked my drinks. I’m sure of it. She said she was on cider but I reckon she was swigging Appletiser.’

  ‘That’ll teach you to not buy the drinks,’ I said.

  ‘So what’s all this about? You going to get my ton back and lock the slag up?’

  ‘Not on my to-do list, no,’ I said. ‘I’m helping her out.’

  ‘Helping her? That cunt? Why?’

  ‘Someone kidnapped her little boy,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ he snapped. And then he thought better of it. Thick as bull semen, but there was some compassion running through his veins. ‘I mean… tough on the kid… Hang on, you think I had something to do with this?’

  ‘Like one of your airborne lattes, it crossed my mind,’ I said.

  ‘Why are you helping her? She’s fucking poison.’

  ‘Old friend. What can you do?’

  ‘Loyalty means nothing to some people.’ He said it sadly, slowly, as if speaking from bitter experience. ‘She’ll fuck you over too. That kind of person can’t help themselves. It’s in the blood.’

  ‘You married?’

  ‘On the verge.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘She’s pregnant. Six months.’

  ‘What were you thinking?’

  He looked utterly miserable, as if he’d walked into the room marked MEATY FLAPS only to find an overweight crow trying to take off. I almost felt sorry for dumping coffee on him.

  ‘What does anybody think, faced with the old life sentence? I panicked. I wanted one last roll in the hay.’

  I believ
ed him. I told him so. I told him I wouldn’t bother him again, but to not push it about getting his money back, to consider it a shot across the bows.

  Before he went off to find some paper towels and a story that wouldn’t make him a laughing stock with his work colleagues, I asked him if there had been anything odd that struck him about Karen.

  ‘You mean other than the fact she’s a jackal in human form?’

  ‘Anything you saw, something she said, anything that happened that made you feel, I don’t know, that it was out of whack, that she was up to something.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean… hindsight and all that, but at the time no. I did it, didn’t I? I didn’t walk away. If there was anything, I guess it was that she wanted to go to the bar all the time. She was utterly cool and calm and in control. It was like she was working to a script.’

  ‘Maybe she was.’

  ‘Maybe. This was obviously nothing new to her.’

  * * *

  I drove to the Tube station and dumped the car. I fed enough coins for a couple of hours’ parking into the meter and texted Jimmy Two to pick her up before lunch and that he could have his wicked way with the old girl for the rest of the day. He texted back to say in that case he was going to visit his ageing mum out in Tooting and take her to Wimbledon Common for the afternoon. The car would be back on my road with a full tank by breakfast. Why can’t there be more people like Jimmy Two in the world?

  I caught a Tube train to Richmond where this special guy Karen had met was living. ‘The One’. I wasn’t expecting to see him – Karen said he worked long hours in the City – I just wanted to get a sense of who he was from the house he lived in. And it was a big house with a lush garden, a driveway spacious enough for three cars. There was evidence – in the plastic toys scattered around the front lawn – of children. And so, again, I just couldn’t see the motivation. The risks of kidnapping someone else’s child – a screaming, teary toddler at that – outweighed any rewards. Benjie Weston, if I were to meet him now, would be just how I imagined him to be: he’d deny it at first, then he’d regret it when I proved to him what I knew. He’d beg me to keep quiet. And he wouldn’t have a clue about any kidnapped boy.