Hope Road (25 page)

Twenty minutes later, on the fifth attempt, he gets lucky.

“Oh, hi,” he says in the best Received Pronunciation he can muster. “This is Chris Turner from BP. I’m head of Human Resources for our global research programme. I think we may have met, some time ago?”

A surprised and quizzical voice at the other end struggles with Mr Turner’s name.

“Ah, perhaps it was…” John says as he scrolls up the departmental page, “Professor Donaldson?”

“Entirely possible,” comes the reply. “Ed’s very much the corporate mover and shaker.”

“That must be it, then. Anyway, I’m trying to get hold of an ex-student of yours. We seem to have misplaced his file. Tall, well built, dark brown hair and thick, pronounced eyebrows. From the Ukraine. Studied Chemical Engineering in 1990, we think.”

“Gosh, that’s a long time ago!”

“Yes,
isn’t
it! Definitely a Ukrainian, though.”

“Mmm… Well I
was
here in 1990,
he says somewhat sadly
!”

A burst of hissy laughter follows.

John persists. “I was thinking, probably not that many Ukrainians enrolling round about that time. Break up of the Eastern Bloc, you know…”

“Ye…s, I see. I do vaguely remember someone. Not sure of the year, though.”

“We’re desperate to get him. There’s a ninety grand a year research directorship just opened up in one of our Caspian projects. I think he’d be perfect. There’d be a finder’s fee, one month of his starting salary. That’d just be between me and you, obviously. The strange thing is, I met him a few years ago, but I’ve misplaced his details.”

“Hold on. Let me see if I can put my hands on the details.”

John’s heart is thumping. This has got to be it.

“Yes, here it is. I remember him now. There were two Ukrainians in 1990. One was a woman, the other was Andriy Danyluk. 1990.”

He reads out an address in Kiev.

“And do you remember him?” John asks, as he scribbles down the address.

“Yes, as it happens I do. He’d been at Kiev University, and he simply turned up here with his transcript, no grant, no support, and demanded to be allowed to study. Paid his fees up front, cash. Supported himself for the whole three years. No idea how.”

I could hazard a guess.

“A real character, he was. Big lad. Very bright.”

“That sounds like him,” John says. “Andriy, yes, I’m almost sure. Look, the finder’s fee, would it be okay if we sent you it personally as a cheque? It’d save me so much paperwork.”

Some
uhm
ing and
agh
ing follows, but not much.

“Super. That’s everything. I’m so very grateful for your help.”

They run through some short, pointless pleasantries. Then:

“Oh, damn it, almost forgot. I really wanted to call in your offices and double check. Thing is, I’m up here in Reykjavík at the moment.”

Reykjavík? Pure improvisation.

He lets the problem hang there a while.

“I just need to see the photo, make sure we don’t have the wrong guy when we go charging in with a job offer.”

“There’s a photo here in his file if that’s any help. Twenty-five years out of date, but I could scan it and e-mail you it, if that would help.”

“Would that be a lot of trouble?”

“Not at all! We have an all-in-one machine. I can do it now.”

John reads out the address of his newly created Gmail account, and after even more expressions of gratitude he hangs up.

The e-mail has arrived when he opens the account. Image file: an application form in the name of Andriy Danyluk. Including a photo
.

Got him.

Five minutes later he’s cramming bundles of banknotes into various pockets, knowing that it’ll all be gone by the end of the day.

He walks down towards Town Street to pick up the Saab, the elation at nailing Bilyk already wearing off. This isn’t about the Ukrainians any more. Or Freddy. It’s about John Ray.

T
he Saab has a dent the size of a dustbin lid on the bonnet. He ignores it, gets in, and lights a cigarette. As he does, the passenger door opens.

“Just drive off,” says Sandy as she slips quickly inside. Her face is drawn and pale, a sleepless night etched across it.

“Okay,” John says, as a combination of rank morning breath and sweet perfume wafts across him. “Where we going?”

“Not far. Anywhere. You can drop me off.”

They drive on in silence for a while.

“And,” he says, hanging a left down onto Kirkstall Road, “is there a reason for this unexpected morning rendezvous, pleasant though it is?”

Only then, as she turns to him, does she see the bruising and cut on his face.

“Hurt, does it?” she says, registering no surprise at all.

“Not much, actually,” he says. “Is this about Lanny by any chance?”

She sniffs. “Give us one of those.”

After she’s lit her cigarette, she tells him to pull over.

They sit and watch the morning traffic stop-starting its way into the city.

“Donna,” she says, her voice at a whisper. “She was Lanny’s daughter.”

His eyes close.

“
Jesus
…”

Slowly he leans forward, until his forehead rests on the steering wheel.

“
Jesus
…
Jesus
…”

She taps ash out of her window, her gaze still fixed on the traffic.

“Who knows?” he says, head still on the steering wheel.

“Apart from her mum? Lanny, and me. That’s it. If he finds out I told you…”

“Yeah, I know. He won’t. Nobody’ll find out from me.”

He sits up.

They both look ahead through the windscreen.

A minute passes. Two.

“Shit!” he says, opening the door and dropping his cigarette onto the ground, then grinding it into the tarmac with his foot. He stays there, half in, half out, head cupped in his hands.

“We’re
not
the only ones.
Hell!
”

He swings his legs back in and slams the door shut again.

“
He
knows. Freddy. Freddy knows, Jesus Christ…”

“What?”

“Agggh!” He pummels his forehead with the ball of his hand. “Fucking hell! She told Freddy. He knows. That’s why he’s so scared. He knows Lanny’s gonna kill him. He doesn’t wanna come out of Millgarth. I don’t blame him. It’s not just the shock, the fact that she’s dead. He’s scared to fucking death.”

John flops back in his seat, fumbling for another cigarette, his fingers trembling.

Sandy waits, watches him struggle with the lighter.

“Him and Donna,” he says, cigarette dancing up and down between his lips, “the two of ’em. They were in a relationship,
in love
, whatever you call it… I think that’s what kept him going back to the hotel. I mean, he was into the counterfeits as well, obviously…”

“The what?”

“Doesn’t matter. He was working for the Ukrainians. But something happened with Donna, her and Freddy. They were in love. Her mother told me that Donna was trying to stop the escort stuff. Sugar said the same thing. I think Freddy was helping her. And he was helping her because they wanted a life together. But Freddy couldn’t let Bilyk down. And she couldn’t just walk away either, they owed her too much money. So the two of them were waiting for the Ukrainians to leave, nice and calm, nice and patient. Freddy’s last collection was on Thursday, and Donna was due to get paid on the Friday. Simple, no fuss, everybody’s happy. She had no other clients. She’d be free. You see?”

Sandy drops her cigarette through the passenger window.

“See what?”

“On the Thursday, Freddy drives to Immingham. Pick-up for Bilyk, the last one. He takes Donna with him. This is it, the final night before she’s free, before she’s made it. And it’s Freddy who’s got her through. Because he loves her. That’s when she tells him who her dad is.”

“And why did she do that?”

“Because she wanted him to know what he was getting himself into. Because she was opening up to him. Y’know, people in love, they tell each other the truth. She loved him, Sandy. Jesus Christ, she fucking loved him…”

“And now she’s dead.”

“And Lanny thinks Freddy killed her.”

“And?”

And.

And.

What are you gonna do, John?

“Okay,” she says, gently, her hand already on the door handle. “You find out who did it. You find out, and you go straight to Lanny. You hear me? Somebody’s gonna pay for this, and I don’t want it to be you.”

“Or Freddy.”

“As long as he didn’t do it.”

“He didn’t.”

She smiles. “I hope you’re right, my love. But if he did…”

With that she’s gone.

H
e parks outside the showroom and reads the three words above the entrance:
Tony Ray’s Motors
. Why has he never changed the name? That’s what the journalist the
Yorkshire Post
had asked. The answer? Because the place isn’t his, and never will be.

He remembers the old premises with a shudder, how he used to hate coming down here, getting his hair ruffled and his arm punched by faux uncles who didn’t seem to have any family to go home to, men that chose to live on the peripheries of society. Twenty-odd years later he’s back. But now he’s one of them.

The new place cost two hundred thousand to build. Joe’s money, everything he left. John hadn’t wanted his brother’s money then, and he doesn’t want the showroom now. The plan: get enough for a yacht, then hand the business over to Freddy. That’s what Connie doesn’t understand. The showroom is irrelevant to him. As for the plan, that’s fucked now anyway. It’s all fucked, unless he can manage to sort it out. Today.

“
They
never had automatic glass doors, though,” he says as he walks into the showroom.

Connie looks up from a copy of
Yachting Monthly
.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

He goes over to the
Gaggia
. And only then do the events of last night reassemble themselves in his mind.

“We’re adults, right?” she says, as he looks around for a clean cup. “It wasn’t illegal and it wasn’t horrible, was it?”

Her face is drawn and there are dark smudges under her eyes. But apart from the hangover mask she’s the same as ever.

“Too much to drink,” he says, as if this is some sort of apology.

“How are the injuries?”

“Not too bad,” he says, running a hand over his face and realising he hasn’t looked at himself in a mirror for quite a while.

He carries his coffee through to the office. Once inside he takes down the photo of the Subaru and removes an envelope stuck to the back of the frame with masking tape. Having the envelope on him will be a risk, but it doesn’t seem so important now. Nothing much does.

“You remember that we agreed to destroy the security tapes?” she says when he emerges from the office.

“Yes. You didn’t do it?”

“I got rid of Monday to Wednesday. But then I thought, Thursday? Freddy takes the car on Thursday night. But they’ve only got his word for it.” She hands him a tape. “This is Thursday. It proves he had the car that evening.”

He stuffs it into the only pocket he can find that isn’t full of money.

“Surveillance…” he says, clicking his fingers, thinking. “Question: when do you change the tape?”

“Me? Half-eight.”

“Every morning, the same time?”

She nods. “Soon as I get here. Routine.”

“Just like Mike Pearce. Routine. He has a drink. Walks to the hotel. Does his rounds. Changes the tape. Routine. Only on Friday Craig changed the video, almost quarter of an hour before Mike got there.”

“He took it out early, then?”

“Yes, but why? Why disturb the routine? Perhaps the tape just finished early, simple as that.”

She shakes her head. “That doesn’t happen.”

“Why not? If they put it in the same time the night before?”

“Well,
exactly
,” she says. “That’s only twenty-four hours.”

He’s confused. “It’s a three-hour tape running at eighth speed. It should record for exactly twenty-four hours, shouldn’t it?”

“Tapes are a little bit longer than what it says on the box. It’s so you can’t complain. Blank video cassettes are normally three or four minutes longer.”

“Really? Learn this working for your uncle, did you?”

“Yep.”

“So if you put a tape in at around midnight, chances are it won’t run out the next day til…?”

“
Way
after midnight,” she says. “Do the maths. Three extra minutes of tape at normal speed is twenty-four minutes in one of those security machines. And if the cassette’s four minutes long, that’s…”

“More than half an hour,” he says, already fumbling for his keys. “The tape at the hotel can’t have finished. It was taken out because someone needed it. I mean, physically… ”

“Why?”

“Oh, I’ve got an idea…” he says, grabbing a telephone on a nearby desk.

He stops.

“Damn it!” he hisses through his teeth, slamming the receiver back down.

He can’t very well ask any more favours from Lanny’s people, not after last night.

“I need to find someone who can pick locks,” he says, slumping into a chair, suddenly deflated. “If not,” he says, pointing to the scar on the side of his head, “the person who did this to me is gonna kill Freddy.”

“Lanny Bride?”

“You told me you didn’t know who Lanny was.”

“Yeah, and you told me you sold cars.”

He smiles.

“Okay, sarcasm aside, do you know anybody who can pick locks or not?”

“Yes. Me.”

“Now, why doesn’t that surprise me…”

“I’ll need to go home and get my stuff.”

“Right. Wait for me there.”

He watches her leave, wondering what he’d have to put on the job description if he ever needed to replace Connie García.

Back in the office he rummages in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and pulls out a pair of kidskin gloves, still in their cellophane wrapper. They were a gift from Joe, years ago. They’ve never been out of the packet. He’s never needed them.