I nodded. ‘I wasn’t passing judge—’
‘And since then? Take a drive down the street. I’ve got guys out there on PCP who think they’re the fucking Terminator. I’ve got seventeen-year-old kids from the council estates with knives the size of your arm.’ He paused, looked at me. ‘So, no, I haven’t spent a lot of time with that file over the last year. I put in my fair share of time when he first went missing, and I got the support of some of the people in here. But as soon as he put his car through the side of a lorry, it became a zero priority case. And you know what? It’s even less than that now.’
I nodded again then decided to move the conversation on.
I removed the Polaroid of Alex I’d taken from the box. Cary eyed me, wondering what I was looking at. I put the picture down on the desk in front him. He glanced at it, then sat forward.
‘Is that Alex?’
‘I think so.’
Cary picked up the picture, holding it in front of him. ‘Who took this?’
‘I don’t know.’
He went quiet again. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘It was in among Kathy’s stuff.’
‘She took it?’
‘No.’
‘So, how did it get there?’
‘I’m not sure.’
He looked like he didn’t believe me.
‘All I know is what I found. I’ve no idea how it got there — but I can take a guess.’
‘So take a guess.’
‘Alex put it there.’
‘After he disappeared?’
I nodded.
‘Why?’
‘They had an arrangement.’
He frowned. ‘An arrangement?’
‘A spot they liked going to together. A place where they used to hide personal stuff.’
He looked at me for a moment, his eyes narrowing a little. Then his expression changed. He opened up the top drawer of his desk and started shuffling around inside. He brought out a notebook, in tatters, the cover falling off, the pages missing their edges. He laid it down, opened it up and studied it. Words, diagrams and reconstructions of crime scenes were crammed into every space. He flicked through it, got halfway, then looked up.
‘You might want to write this down,’ he said.
I took out my notepad.
‘Like I said, I did some asking around when Alex first went missing. Called a few people. I asked his mum for his card numbers, and his bank details. Basically, anything he could draw on I wanted to know about. It was the best lead we’d have.’
‘But he didn’t take his card with him.’
‘He didn’t take his debit card, no.’
He looked at his notebook. At the top of the page, written in black and circled in red, was a number.
‘He left his debit card behind, but he took his credit card with him,’ Cary said, prodding the number with his finger. ‘It was valid for another five years after he went missing, so I figured it was worth keeping an eye on. I arranged with Mary and the bank to have all his credit card statements redirected to me. And they kept coming, and coming, and coming, and every time the statements arrived on my desk, I’d open them up and they’d be blank.’
‘He never used the card — not even once?’
Cary shook his head. ‘Every month there’d be nothing in them. I spent four and a half years looking through his statements, and four years and a half years putting them straight in the bin.’
He ran a finger along the number in the notebook.
‘Then, about six months before he died…’ He paused, glanced at me. ‘The statements stopped coming.’
‘Because the card had expired?’
‘No. The card had about six months left to run.’
‘So, why’d they stop?’
‘I called the bank to find out. They wouldn’t release any information initially, so I kind of…pretended it was part of an investigation. They accessed the account for me and said the statements were still being sent out, and would only stop once the card had expired.’
‘But it hadn’t expired.’
‘No. The obvious assumption was that the last statement got lost in the post, so I asked them to send out a duplicate. The guy said he’d put it in the post overnight.’ He paused, sat back. ‘But that never arrived either.’
‘How come?’
‘I called the bank again, told them the duplicate hadn’t turned up, and they asked me to confirm my address. So, I gave it to them—’
‘But it wasn’t the address they had.’
He looked at me, nodded. ‘Right. Four and a half years after he disappears, and suddenly he changes his address.’
‘Alex changed it?’
He shrugged. ‘I spoke to the bank a third time, pushed the whole investigation angle, and they made the new statements available to me. Same as always — the card remained unused. But it wasn’t registered to Alex any more. It was registered as a business account.’
‘A business account?’
‘The Calvary Project.’
‘That was the name of the business?’
‘Who the fuck knows? I had their name and address from the bank and I still couldn’t find any trace of them. There’s no Inland Revenue records, no website,no public listing anywhere — nothing. You want my opinion, it’s vapour.’
‘You mean some sort of front?’
He shrugged again. I looked at him, trying to figure out why he wasn’t more determined to dig deeper. He pushed the notebook towards me and leaned over his desk, jabbing a finger at the number.
‘Treat yourself,’ he said.
‘That’s part of the credit card number?’
‘No. That’s the telephone number for the Calvary Project.’
It was a landline, but there was no area code in front, which was why I hadn’t worked out what it was.
‘You tried calling it?’
‘About a hundred thousand times.’
‘No answer?’
He shook his head.
‘Where’s the street address?’
‘London.’
‘You went up there?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying? The whole case is a lockdown. The card’s expired, and a year ago I spent three hours picking up bits of Alex’s skull from a fucking field.’
‘Did you tell Mary?’
‘About what?’
‘About what you’d found.’
‘No. What’s the point?’
‘Don’t you think she has a right to know?’
‘A right to know what exactly?’ he said. ‘That she should take a long, hard look at another dead end? Forget it. I didn’t tell her anything because nothing leads anywhere. The case — if it even was a case — is over. It’s done.’
Suddenly it came to me. I saw why the case had never been taken further: Cary didn’t want to expose himself to new, corrupting information about Alex. He loved his friend. He was disappointed by the way he’d died. He didn’t want to taint any more of his memories of him.
Yet I could see something else too. Just a flicker. A part Cary had always tried to bury. A part desperate for answers.
‘So, where in London is it based?’
‘Some place in Brixton. I gave the details to a guy I know who works for the Met and he pissed himself laughing. Apparently the only businesses being run out of there are from suitcases full of crack.’
Cary laid a thick hand across the notebook and pulled it back towards him, dropping it into his top drawer. When he looked up, his eyes narrowed again as if he’d seen something in my face.
‘What?’ he said.
‘I’ve got one more question.’
He didn’t move.
‘Well, more of a favour, to be honest.’
‘That file not enough for you?’
‘Basically, I was hoping you might be able to give me some…technical help.’