I was crouched down on the floor, staring into this drawer full of confusion, trying to work out what, if anything, it meant, when I heard a quiet shuffle in the doorway behind me, followed almost immediately by Helen Gerrish’s frail little voice.
‘Have you found anything yet?’
I quickly closed the drawer and stood up. ‘No … no, nothing yet, I’m afraid …’
‘Is there anything I can do to help you?’
Yeah, I thought, don’t ever creep up on me again.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, glancing around the room. ‘I’m just about done in here, anyway.’ Which I wasn’t, but I didn’t want to keep poking around in Anna’s things with her mother looking over my shoulder, and it didn’t seem quite right to ask Helen to leave me alone either. So, noticing a few items of jewellery beside a little box on the bedside table, I said to Helen, ‘Actually, you could have a quick look through Anna’s jewellery for me while I check the bathroom … if you don’t mind.’
‘Her jewellery?’
‘Over there,’ I said, indicating the bedside table. ‘Just see if there’s anything missing …’
‘But I don’t know — ’
‘It’s all right, just have a look. You might remember something.’ I smiled at her. ‘OK?’
‘Well, if you think it might help.’
I watched her as she moved hesitantly over to the bedside table, sat down on the edge of the bed, and started picking reluctantly at the pieces of jewellery. She handled the necklaces and bracelets as if she could hardly bear to touch them, and the look on her face — a pained and sickened expression — was a look that verged on disgust. It was like watching someone retrieving their lost contact lenses from a steaming pile of dog shit.
I stood there watching her for a moment or two, briefly transfixed by her oddness, then — with a baffled shake of my head — I left the room and went into the bathroom.
There wasn’t a lot to look at in there — toilet, bath, sink, cupboard. There was a toothbrush and toothpaste in a glass on the sink, and in a cupboard over the sink there were several more items which I would have expected Anna to take with her if she’d been planning to go away — Tampax, talcum powder, make-up remover, nail files … stuff like that. There was a fair amount of over-the-counter medication in there too — paracetamol, Gaviscon, Benylin, Night Nurse. In fact, the cupboard was so packed full that I doubted if anything had been removed from it. Which, again, suggested that maybe Anna hadn’t just packed a suitcase and left.
The cupboard wasn’t all that sturdy, and as I closed the door and pushed it shut I heard a load of stuff inside falling over. I thought about just leaving it, but that didn’t seem right, so I carefully inched open the door again … and half a dozen bottles and tubs fell out, scattering pills and God-knows-what all over the floor.
‘Shit,’ I muttered.
Helen called out from the bedroom. ‘Is everything all right in there?’
‘Yeah,’ I called back. ‘I just dropped something, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.’
It was quite a poky little bathroom, with not much room for manoeuvring, and as I kneeled down on the floor to start clearing up the mess, my foot bashed into the bath panel and knocked it loose.
‘Fucking hell,’ I whispered, turning round to inspect the damage.
Nothing was broken. The plastic panel had just come away, as if it hadn’t been fixed on properly in the first place. And when I looked closer, pushing the loose panel back and peering into the space under the bath, I realised that the panel was supposed to be loose, because Anna had been using the space behind it as a hiding place. And what she’d been hiding in there, and what was still in there now, was heroin. Four wraps of heroin, a syringe, a box of needles, a packet of alcohol swabs, and a spoon.
And that changed things. It changed Anna’s life and the world she inhabited. It made her more vulnerable, more desperate, more liable to risk. It made her more likely to associate with the kind of people who might want to hurt her. And if she was an addict, which was by no means definite, as it wasn’t impossible that she just used the stuff now and then … but if she was an addict, she’d never have willingly gone away and left all her gear behind.
And that changed the way I was thinking.
The way I was thinking now was that although Helen Gerrish’s reasons for worrying about her daughter were wrong, it was beginning to look like she was probably right to be worried.
When I went back into the bedroom, Helen was still perched on the edge of the bed, but she’d given up on the jewellery now and was just sitting there staring at nothing.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked quietly.
She turned slowly and looked at me. ‘Yes … yes, I’m fine, thank you.’
‘Any luck with the jewellery?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I’m sorry … the only thing of Anna’s that I’m familiar with is a necklace she wore all the time, and that’s not here.’
‘What kind of necklace? Can you describe it?’
‘It’s a silver half-moon on a silver chain … she’s had it for years.’ Helen looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘You know, I don’t even know where she got it from …’
‘A silver half-moon?’ I said.
Helen nodded. ‘She should be wearing it in the photograph I gave you.’
I took the photo out of my pocket and saw that she was right. Sunlight was glinting from a small silver crescent on a necklace around Anna’s neck.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘well, that’s something.’
‘Are we finished here now?’
I nodded. ‘If that’s OK with you.’
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘Yes, I’d like to go home now.’
6
It was getting on for nine o’clock when we left the block of flats and walked back to my car. The rain was still falling, thin and cold in the night, and the streets of Quayside were beginning to stir with a few early clubbers and drinkers. As I opened the passenger door, and Helen got into the car, I could hear the shrieks and machine-gun heels of a gaggle of good-time girls making their way into the night. I wondered briefly what the next four or five hours would hold for them — love, sex, happiness … a drunken slap in the face?
I looked down at Helen. ‘Would it be all right if I found a taxi to take you home?’
‘A taxi? Yes … yes, of course …’
‘It’s just that The Wyvern’s not far from here,’ I explained. ‘So I might as well pop in there while I’m down this way, you know … see if anyone knows anything.’
‘Yes,’ Helen repeated. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’
She shook her head.
I looked at her sitting there — forlorn and lost, old before her time — and I thought about changing my mind. But she wasn’t paying me to look after her, was she? She wasn’t paying me to comfort her soul. She was paying me to find her daughter.
And, besides, I needed to be on my own for a while.
I needed time to think.
And I really needed a drink.
There was a taxi rank just along from the nightclubs, and I managed to get Helen in the cab with the least unsavoury-looking driver. She didn’t look all that happy as the taxi pulled away, and I couldn’t help feeling a tiny pang of guilt, but it wasn’t that hard to ignore it.
As I got back in my car and started heading down towards the old part of Quayside, trying to remember exactly where The Wyvern was, I noticed a silver-grey Renault about thirty metres behind me. It was too far back to see the driver, but I was pretty sure that I’d seen the same Renault parked in the street outside the block of flats.
It was probably nothing, but I made a note of the registration number anyway, and when I eventually found the street where The Wyvern was — a narrow little lane called Miller’s Row — and I saw that the Renault was still behind me, I momentarily slowed down, as if I was turning into Miller’s Row, then at the very last second I changed gear and kept going straight on. I didn’t speed up at all, I just drove quite steadily away from Quayside, up into town, and then I took a series of right turns that gradually brought me back down to Quayside, and by the time I’d reached Miller’s Row again, there was no sign of the Renault. I parked the car halfway along the street, turned off the engine, and waited.