The Ties That Bind (32 page)

The man gulped air like a caught fish.

‘Trust me,’ continued Luke, ‘It’s not you I’m interested in. I just want to find out what happened to Jasper Patten. I
need
to.’ Something in Luke’s desperation must have appealed to the man because he cleared his throat, then sat down on the bed, gesturing to Luke to occupy the only chair. From here he could see a street-sweeper’s hi-vis tabard hanging on the back of the door.

‘You’ve probably guessed I was not born here.’ His English was slow, careful, deliberate.

‘Where are you from, then?’ He gave an empty smile.

‘You’d have to beat that out of me. But let us just say it’s somewhere I really cannot go back to.’ Luke’s mind was a bank of screens displaying news footage from the war-scorched sub-Sahara: child soldiers, rape as a weapon of conflict. How bad must it be, what had he seen and done that this lonely little life was preferable?

‘Are you an asylum seeker?’ He tried to keep the judgement out of his voice, but the man’s face hardened anyway.

‘I applied for asylum when my student visa expired, but . . .’ he spread his hands in a vast shrug.

‘They refused you?’

‘I didn’t give them a chance.’ He gave a deep, in-for-a-penny sigh. ‘I did something very cowardly. While I was waiting to hear about the application I met Jasper Patten.’

‘When was this?’

‘Ten years ago. It was another house full of casualties, dropouts, addicts . . . and me. Jasper had the room next door. He was a nice guy. A bit deluded. He drank, you know. There’s nothing more unreliable than a drinker, or an addict. They have all got their fantasy. Jasper claimed to be a writer. Everyone’s something in here. The man in the room opposite thinks he used to play drums for the Grateful Dead.’

‘Actually, he
was
a writer,’ said Luke, instinctively leaping to the defence of the man he thought of, in a strange way, as a colleague. ‘He’d published six books, and was writing another. It’s the one he was working on when you knew him that I’m interested in.’

‘My God,’ said the man, blowing out his lower lip. ‘That man, a
published
writer. I’m astonished. But you know . . . now I come to think of it . . . it makes more sense, now.’

‘What does?’

‘He told me that he had found something out, that he had made some breakthrough on the book he was working on, something that no one else seemed to have uncovered. The last time I saw him, he said he was off to interview someone about it.’

‘And he didn’t say what? I know it’s a long time ago, but try to remember. It’s important.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said the man, gentle with sincerity. ‘I dismissed it, like I dismissed all his stories. I just assumed he’d gone off on a binge.’

‘The last time you saw him? You mean he never came back from this interview?’

The man lowered his eyes to his lap. ‘It was not unusual for Jasper to disappear for days on end. It’s not at all unusual for men to leave their hostel and never come back. If someone like him went off, there wasn’t a lot they could do. The place was a slum but it was an in-demand slum. If you didn’t sleep in your bed for five days, they cleared out your stuff and gave your room to someone else. On the fourth day of not seeing Jasper, I knew he was not coming back – I’ve seen enough men disappear to get a sixth sense for these things. And I thought, what if they say no, the Home Office? Why do it by the book and risk being deported when a life was there for the taking? I could do more with that man’s identity, with his life, than he ever managed.’ He looked defiantly at Luke, who didn’t bother to hide the admiration he was beginning to feel. ‘His room was easy to get into. I didn’t take any of his clothes or anything but I helped myself to his documentation – everything, even his passport. I knew people who knew people who could work miracles, doctor a white man’s passport so that it showed my face. Anything made of paper, I took it.’

Luke could no longer blame McRae. The identity fraud had been seamless, undetectable.

‘And that was the end of Jasper Patten,’ he said, almost to himself.

‘I didn’t just take over his life straight away. For
months
I kept an eye on his bank account, to see if he had tried to access it or have it closed down. I had his pass book but I assume his cashpoint card was with him because it wasn’t in his room. There was a hundred pounds in Jasper’s bank account when I took it over, and more came in every week. He would never have left that sort of money untouched. It would have bought a lot of alcohol. That’s when I really knew he wasn’t coming back. I could have taken the lot, you know, but I took him off benefits and put him to work – two, three jobs at a time if I had to.’ He eyeballed Luke, thread veins lacing the whites. ‘What are you going to do?’

He had put the poor man through enough. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t bother you again. To be honest, I think good luck to you.’ Luke could not help but sweep the room for traces of Patten’s research, a torn page of notes, even though he knew it was hopeless. There were no drawers in the desk and this itinerant refugee was no hoarder, no Sandy. Knowing the question was hopeless, he asked it anyway. ‘I don’t suppose you kept his notes?’

The African shook his head. ‘I kept nothing but the documents I would need to work. Birth certificate, National Insurance card. Those notebooks weren’t worth the paper they were made of. You know the way words crawl up the page if you try to read when you’re drunk? His writing actually looked like that. I couldn’t read them. So I threw them in a bin in a park.’

Chapter 48

All Luke wanted was space and quiet but the streets outside the hostel were thronged with people, all walking in the opposite direction to him. He jostled and elbowed his way through the rush hour crowds in his desperation to get to the beach. He was pulled towards the water, desperately hoping that once he was there the new and terrible mysteries swirling around his head would settle and separate into something simple, something he could understand, like the line between the sky and the sea.

The decision to approach Joss Grand directly had been based on the assumption that Patten was still out there somewhere. This supposition – no, this
certainty
– had informed every decision he had made since. When Grand had denied talking to Jasper Patten, Luke had believed him. But that had been before he denied Sandy and proved himself a liar. Now, a new and threatening possibility was inescapable. He had lied about knowing Patten because he had killed him, or had him killed. No wonder he had spoken so freely and on the record. He was
playing
with Luke, the way a cat toys with a mouse it intends to kill.

It was high tide and the beach had dwindled to a thin shingled spit between the esplanade and the sea, but Luke was afraid to stick to the pavement in case that black Bentley suddenly kerb-crawled him and dragged him inside. He walked back to Hove along the darkening beach, his ankles turning in on themselves as he stumbled over pebbles, his shins catching on splintering wood as he vaulted groynes.

He did not feel safe in the cottage. In a panic, he threw some clothes into his rucksack and stuffed his laptop and every page of his notes into his satchel. He placed them by the back door so that if someone approached by the front, he could make his escape over the wall into Caleb and Belinda’s garden.

He ran himself a mug of water from the tap and stared through the black mirror of the kitchen window into the little courtyard, barely illuminated by the spare glow of next door’s security light. The raised flowerbed on the back wall still bore a few shoots of greenery and one or two determined geranium heads retained their pink petals. Luke froze, his cup overflowing, as he recalled Grand wondering aloud whether that flowerbed had ever been weeded. Oh, God. It couldn’t be, could it? Here all the time? It was the only place he hadn’t looked on his first search of the property.

Leaning against the outhouse was the slanted offcut of MDF that Caleb had used to board the back door after Jem’s break-in. It was a perfect makeshift shovel. Luke began to dig, beheading dying flowers and slicing through their stems. He dug with such force that the MDF broke in half twice and he had to use his hands. The soil seemed to go on for ever as his fingers tore at white roots that glowed like bone but bent like rubber.

‘Come on, Jasper,’ panted Luke, ‘Come on, mate. If you’re not in here, I don’t know what he’s done with you.’ Elbows-deep in earth now, he continued to dig until he’d almost emptied the flowerbed. There was nothing at the bottom but poured concrete, level with – and as old as – that which floored the rest of the courtyard. He clawed his hands and gave it one last go, scraping a knuckle on a rough surface. The pain made him scream like a child. He heard Caleb and Belinda’s patio door slide open and retreated into the kitchen before they could see the state of him.

‘
Fuck
,’ he said, running his hand under the kitchen tap. Blood chased mud down the plughole. He ran his hands under the kitchen tap but filth lodged under his fingernails. He poured washing up liquid between his palms and the cut on his hand caught fire. Looking down, he experienced a strong wave of dizziness that had him gripping the edge of the sink. It could have been the sight of his knuckle through the broken skin, or the fact that it was hours since he had last eaten. There was nothing in the house but some yellowing milk in the bottom of a bottle. Swooning again, Luke knew that food must be his short-term priority. Eating would not solve his larger problems, but it would at least enable him to order and analyse them.

He rifled through the stack of menus on the kitchen worktop, covering them in scarlet fingerprints. Christ, that was all this house needed, more blood to clean up. He was still finding traces of Jem’s in unexpected places.

Luke was about to stab the numbers of the pizza place when his phone trilled in his hand. It was Sandy, calling from home. There was no way he could talk to her in this state. He was bound to blurt something stupid. He would sit down, order food, clean himself up and eat before calling her back. When the phone fell silent, it was not followed by the expected voicemail beep, but rang again immediately. Then again; he could not ignore the third call.

‘Sandy?’ he said, hoping despite himself that it was something that could be put off until later.

‘Thank God you picked up,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘Luke, I’ve just seen Joss Grand’s car pull up outside my house.’

There was no sign of the Bentley anywhere on the square, despite plenty of empty spaces. Sandy’s front door was ajar, splinters of wood on the jamb showing that the lock had been forced. Luke pushed it with his toe and the wind did the rest, rinsing through the hall, like smoking something out in reverse. It lifted a sheaf of newsprint cuttings, loose on the top of the cabinet, and scattered them. He ran through the whirling pages and into the sitting room. A cup of coffee on the table was lukewarm.

He rushed up the stairs, calling for her. All of the steel doors were unlocked, keys in the holes as usual. He flung open the wardrobes in her bedroom because that was what people did on television. Those that were not full of clothes were stuffed with paper.

He wondered if he had done the right thing in closing the door behind him. He could not picture Sandy opening her locks and bolts to admit Joss Grand into her house. He could not picture her voluntarily leaving with him. He
could
picture a dozen grisly alternatives, and all of them were his fault. He remembered her voice on the telephone, sounding scared, sounding
old
. He was sick with worry and guilt. Charlene was right: he didn’t deserve friends. He vowed that if Sandy was safe he would make a fresh start, he would come clean, he would never use anyone again.

He tried to supplant his worst-case scenario with hopeful conjecture. She had called him to say that the Bentley was outside, but Grand slowed Vaughan down and she would have had plenty of time to give them the slip, perhaps leaving the house by the fire escape.

Luke stood in Sandy’s hallway, utterly directionless, his eyes sweeping the cluttered interior in the desperate hope of guidance. There were so many millions of words in this house and not one of them could instruct him. His gaze snagged on the one door in the house he had never seen opened, the slanted lintel under the stairs that familiarity had rendered all but invisible. Sandy had said that the cellar was rotten and off-limits; where better then for her to hide? Placing his hand on the smooth round knob, he pushed.

The stench of damp punched him in the nose and his empty stomach contracted in a reflex heave. He felt along the wall for a light switch. The bulb fizzed reluctantly into life, as though after a long hibernation. At Luke’s feet was a short landing that dropped off into a slanted set of wooden steps almost as steep as a ladder. A rope banister was secured to the filthy, mouldering wall with metal rings. There wasn’t much else to see. The space was vast but windowless, fungus blackening the uneven plasterwork of its walls. In a dark corner was an old twin-tub washing machine, a couple of stained mattresses, buckets and some bags of hardened cement. Most of the floor was bare concrete. The damp smell swirled like marsh gas, making him breathe through his mouth.

A little whirring sound an inch or so to the left of his ear turned out to be a gas meter, its silver spinning disc like a tiny record in a jukebox. Below it, a rolling counter turned slowly on an electricity gauge. Luke was about to close the door on the basement when his focus glanced upon something else fixed to the wall, something the shape and size of a postcard. The metal was blackened with neglect but the lettering was still legible and differed from the one in his own house by only a single digit.

A Jocelyn Grand Property

Lettings and Management

Telephone Brighton 625445

For a foolish second he considered that he might have wandered into a neighbouring house, that he was not in Sandy’s place at all, but that was soon eclipsed by fresh agonies of confusion. What did this mean? It must be that the house was previously a Grand property, and that Sandy and Ted had bought it from the agency. But no – Charlene had said, and he had read, that Grand only accumulated, he hadn’t sold a single property since his company’s inception. Luke’s mind span like the little silver disc on the meter, gathering speed and blurring clarity.