You Will Never Find Me (21 page)

‘It's only after her . . . her death that we're finding out how removed Amy had become,' said Mercy. ‘And . . . cruel too. The punishment she's meted out . . . to me especially. Why are kids so cruel?'

‘They don't know what it's like to have a person's love, hope and expectations wrapped up in another human being.'

‘The more I sought it, the more I wanted it, the more I demanded it . . . the crueller she became.'

‘I was the same with Alyshia when she came back from Mumbai,' said Isabel. ‘She was living with me and I thought I deserved some intimacy. She didn't want to talk because, well . . . it was too complicated. The more I wanted something from her, the nastier she got.'

But even as Mercy was talking and listening, she didn't quite believe it—not of all kids. She thought about Sasha, the kidnapped boy: the way he'd looked after his mother, protected her from the world, which would have taken him away from her. He must have known he was everything to her and built the ideal fiction around her so the worst wouldn't happen. His case had gripped Mercy and she needed to go back to it precisely because of what had happened to Amy. Sasha must not go down on her watch.

‘You're thinking.'

Mercy told her about Sasha, not his case, just his life. Isabel stared out of the fogging window as they arrived at her house in Aubrey Walk.

Isabel installed Mercy in a bedroom, gave her some pyjamas. Mercy took a shower, let the water pummel her shoulders while she stared, mesmerised, at the vortex in the plughole. She hung on to the glass walls and wept with her head jammed into the corner and wondered if she'd ever be able to stop because it had just hit her with a terrible force that this was not finite. This was for ever. They were never going to able to repair the complex damage done between them because Amy was never coming back.

 

Esme Boxer was not in good shape. Her breathing was fast, her heart rate rapid, pulse thready and her blood pressure low. The doctors and nurses working on her knew that time was against them. The drug and alcohol were already in her system. They were battling against coma and death.

They administered large volumes of intravenous fluids in the hope of stabilising her condition. They intubated her using a ventilator to maintain her breathing. Finally they gave her kidney dialysis to remove substances already absorbed into her system. During these procedures her heart stopped beating twice. The crash team stepped in to revive her.

Papadopoulos saw nothing of this. He paced the waiting room taking calls from Boxer, who'd been given his number by Makepeace, every five minutes.

‘Still nothing,' said Papadopoulos. ‘No news is good news at this stage.'

‘But she was definitely alive when the ambulance brought her in?'

‘I was with her. She was breathing. The paramedics handed her over in that state. I'll call you as soon as there's news.'

And five minutes later Boxer would call again.

 

‘I'm bored,' said Sasha tentatively.

‘Shut up,' said the voice, a third one. They were taking it in turns to be with him after the business in the toilet.

‘Why won't you talk to me? I could practise my Russian.'

No answer. Sasha heard the pages of a magazine turning.

‘What are you reading?'

Still no answer.

‘Can I have a football? You won't have to talk to me and I won't be bored.'

‘No,' said the voice. ‘Shut up.'

‘You play chess?'

A sigh from the corner of the room.

‘I play chess. I'm good. I could beat you,' said Sasha.

‘I doubt it.'

‘Why?'

‘You're a kid. I've been playing chess longer than you've been alive,' said the voice. ‘And anyway, you can't see.'

‘I play from memory. I do that with my dad all the time. You make the moves, and I'll still beat you.'

Silence and he knew he'd got to him.

‘Wait.'

The man cuffed Sasha's wrists and left the room, came back minutes later with a chessboard, set out the pieces. Sasha played white. The man quickly realised that Sasha was no novice, found himself in trouble.

‘My bishop takes your knight,' said the man.

‘I don't think so,' said Sasha.

‘What do you mean?'

‘You've only got one bishop and it's on white; both my knights are on black squares.'

‘You're not thinking straight.'

‘I am,' said Sasha. ‘You've seen that you're checkmate in two moves and now you're trying to cheat.'

The man hit him hard on the side of the head, knocking him off the wooden slatted bench.

 

Mercy was sitting on the sofa in a white towelling dressing gown and slippers. She stared into space and sipped sweet tea while Isabel made some mushroom risotto in the kitchen. The phone rang several times. Her own mobile was upstairs. She didn't want to talk to anybody, couldn't face calling her family in Ghana. Uncle David's funeral was starting tomorrow and news of another death would be too dreadful. At least, that was how she rationalised it to herself.

Isabel called her in for supper. She wasn't hungry but knew she had to eat. They drank red wine from Portugal. Mercy had to hold herself back, tamp down that real need to get blotto.

‘The phone's been going,' said Mercy.

‘The first time it was Alyshia from Paris. The other times it was Charlie making sure you're all right. He wants to talk to you. I told him to wait.'

‘I just don't know what to say,' said Mercy. ‘I've never been any good at translating feelings into words. Nothing seems . . . adequate.'

‘It doesn't matter. Nobody is expecting anything. People just want to hear your voice. It places you in their world.'

‘I'll talk to him if he calls again.'

‘What about your family?'

‘They're in Africa. They forget the UK when they're there. There's no time. The days fill, especially with a funeral. It's more important to lay someone to rest than it is to get married. That's when you become an ancestor.'

‘Did they all know Amy?'

‘They all looked after her at one time or another when I was working and Charlie was away,' said Mercy. ‘But, you know, I'm not quite trusted.'

‘Why not?'

‘I ran away. They all knew what my father was like and what it was like for us to be in his house. The darkness. The fear. But you never run away from your family. That is suspect behaviour.'

‘Is that why you're not there?'

‘I use work as an excuse. I know I should go, especially for this particular man, who is very important. I just don't want to get involved. I was the eldest daughter. My mother died so I was mother to the others. And I ran away. When I go over there people can hardly bear to look at me, although it's got better since my father died.'

‘Did you go into the police force to . . . make amends with your father?'

She'd never thought of it like that.

‘That's probably true,' she said. ‘Although I'm not sure how I'd disentangle that from the family mess inside me. The awful truth is that I'm very like my father. I'm strict, demanding, thorough, self-disciplined . . . In a word, I'm hard. Being here in the UK I've learned to cover it up. I make jokes. But my colleagues know what I'm like underneath.'

‘You're not
hard
, Mercy,' said Isabel. ‘I've been with someone very hard. My ex-husband wasn't an actor when I met him—at least, I didn't think so. Then I realised he'd been one all the time. He understood what people wanted to see. You're just using humour to soften your edges. My ex pretended so that nobody could see the real horror underneath. When you say you have trouble putting feelings into words, to me that means you're not sentimental, which is what we've all become now. You're not hard, Mercy. You're admirable.'

‘Amy didn't think so,' said Mercy and she started crying.

 

The leader of the A & E team treating Esme Boxer came into the waiting room in greens, a mask hanging off one ear. He looked weary, as if he was coming to the end of a long shift. The doctor beckoned to Papadopoulos and they went into an office behind the reception area.

‘Are you next of kin?'

‘No. I brought her in but I can get her son on the phone for you. He's in Madrid,' said Papadopoulos. ‘She's O.K., isn't she?'

The doctor cocked his head from side to side as if there was something sixty-forty about it and the wrong way.

 

Boxer was sitting on the edge of the bed back in the same room that Amy had booked in the Hotel Moderno. It had taken him time to extricate himself from the care of Inspector Jefe Luís Zorrita, who was determined that he should not spend the night alone. The Spaniard had given him a cheek swab for DNA purposes and confirmed that Mercy's DNA details had arrived by email. Zorrita assured him that his home was open to him any time, day or night. They'd hugged, a manly Spanish hug which didn't mind cheek-to-cheek contact. It felt like a small betrayal to Boxer as he left the detective in the Jefatura and got into the police car Zorrita had arranged for him.

The only state Boxer wanted to be in now was alone. He had plans forming rapidly in his mind and they included acts that were best executed some distance from the eyes of a homicide detective.

The call came through from the Royal Free and Boxer listened to the doctor's description of his mother's condition and her treatment.

‘The good news is that she's stable and her pupils are still reacting to light. What we don't know yet is the real extent of the brain activity. I'm still concerned she may lapse into deep coma and become effectively brain dead while we artificially maintain vital signs.'

It was not a terminal conversation but the prognosis was not great. The doctor did not hold back on how serious it was to mix benzodiazepines with alcohol, even if the litre bottle of Grey Goose had not been full. It was, he said, the most common combination for successful suicides. Boxer told him he would be on the first flight out of Madrid in the morning. The doctor hoped there would be no change in her condition for the next twelve hours. They hung up.

Boxer lay down with the mobile on his chest and stared at the ceiling. At least he hadn't lost both mother and daughter on the same day. It didn't make him feel any better. It wasn't cold in the room, but he felt chilled to the bone, his fingers as stiff as porcelain. A wind was whistling past the window, rattling something against the side of the building. It was no different to what was going on inside his chest except somehow smaller. The vast, cratering blackness under his ribcage felt as terminal as a collapsing star. All vestiges of light were being consumed by it. He couldn't ever imagine being refilled or lit in any way.

He reached for the phone, called room service, ordered a hamburger and chips. He booked a flight out of Madrid in the morning. He waited for room service to arrive and called reception to say he wanted no calls or visitors, that he was going to sleep. He put the food into the wastepaper basket's bin liner and tucked it into his jacket. He put the plate outside his room and took the stairs down to the garage, where he threw the hamburger into the rubbish. He located all the CCTV cameras and worked his way along the walls and up the access ramp and out into the cold Madrid night.

I
don't talk to anyone now,' said Isabel.

‘What do you mean?'

‘I don't have intimate talk, revealing talk, interesting talk with anyone any more,' said Isabel. ‘My closest friend lives in Brazil. My daughter has her own life and keeps me at arm's length. I have my colleagues at the publishing house, but I don't tell them anything important.'

They were in the sitting room. Mercy was back drinking tea. The second glass of wine had set off an inner trembling, as if there was a lot more in the sub-cranial murk of her mind that wanted to surface. She needed to be in control if she was going to talk to Isabel, whose intuition and clarity of mind was attractive but unnerving. She'd spoken to Charlie briefly, just to say she was all right. Hearing his voice had given her some solidity and made her more wary of Isabel. There'd been a change in Mercy's body language. At the table they'd been close and open. Now Mercy was leaning away, heels up, while Isabel was lying on the sofa, head propped on hand, wine glass on the floor, unaware of this other Mercy now watching her.

‘I thought you and Alyshia were close, especially since the kidnap.'

‘I learned more about her during the kidnap than I wanted to. I'd built an idea of her, but now I know there was a lot missing from it. That's all gone. She's still my daughter and I love her, but I don't know her any more. I
wanted
to know her, which was probably my mistake because it made her secretive. It's a difficult thing to learn that your child is . . . another person. And Alyshia is more like her father, which means I'll probably never know her. It's strange that all the things I found romantic and sexy in Chico, like the dark side, the mystery, his secrets, his ambition, I find I can't abide in Alyshia. Things might change now. She's been more loving since the kidnap was over but . . . There I go again. Ever hopeful.'

‘And Charlie?'

‘We haven't had much of a chance,' said Isabel, taking a huge glug of wine. ‘But you know, Mercy, that's not how I am in love. I say that as if I'm an expert, and yet there hasn't been anyone since Chico. But on that form I would say that I'm not looking for total intimacy from a partner. Chico was never that intimate—we never revealed things to each other—which was probably why we lasted so long. If I'd known more I'd have run screaming.'