Vanished (47 page)

‘Anywhere between 3,000 and 5,000 dollars. But do you know how much the high rollers will lose at the tables?’ He lowered his voice, like he was imparting some ancient secret. ‘
Twice that much
. No one beats the house. High rollers come in here with their credit lines, and their casino-paid hotel rooms and five-star meals, thinking they’re going to defy the odds, that the casino’s losing out. But every game here –
every
game in
every
single casino in the city – is designed to give the house a mathematical advantage.’

The man shifted from side to side, one hand pressed against the stool between us, the other flat to the marble of the bar. He was missing nails on the first two fingers of
his one hand, like they’d been torn off. ‘You know what they call that?’ he asked quietly.

‘Call what?’

‘The mathematical advantage?’

I glanced over the man’s shoulder. Still no sign of Lee. It must have been five or six minutes since he’d left. The man moved in even closer when he didn’t get a response, his fingers inches from mine. I glanced down at his missing nails, then back up at him.

‘It’s called “the edge”,’ he said.

He stayed like that for a moment and then, finally, moved his hand off the stool and on to the marble, as if signalling for service. At the other end of the bar, the barman started to come over but then the man made eye contact with him – a tiny, fractional swivel of the head – and the barman stopped immediately, as if he’d been hit by a truck. When I looked back at the man, something had changed in him – something subtle – and a ripple of alarm passed through me.

We stayed like that for a moment, the
ding, ding, ding
of the slots ringing around us, then I slid off the stool, pulled a couple of $10 bills out and left them on the counter for the barman. I turned back to the man. He was about five inches shorter than me, but it didn’t make me feel any easier around him. He was still standing in the same position, body turned to the bar, hands flat in front of him, head turned towards me.

‘You off to bed?’ he said.

‘Something like that.’

I went to step around him – but then he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into him. His grip was like a
vice. I stumbled, completely knocked off balance. Then instinct kicked in: I pushed back at him and ripped my arm free.

‘What the fuck is the matter with you?’

He realigned himself: both hands flat to the counter. ‘Let me give you a piece of advice.’

‘Let me give
you
one: don’t
ever
touch me.’

I went to leave.

‘Someone will always have the edge over you, David.’

I stopped. Turned back to him. ‘What did you say?’

‘You’re just flesh and bones like everyone else.’

‘What?’

There was a threat in him now, as if he’d completely changed his appearance somehow. His eyes seemed darker. His face was twisted up like an animal about to strike. ‘Go back home to your wife,’ he said, looking me up and down. Then he leaned in and dropped his voice to a whisper: ‘And do both of you a favour: stay out of our business.’

‘What the hell are you talking about? I don’t even know you.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But you know Lee Wilkins.’

He nodded once, eyes fixed on mine, then pushed past me and headed out into the casino. Inside a couple of seconds, he was disappearing into the crowds.

Inside ten, he was gone.

The boy trudged across the shingle beach, six feet from where the waves were breaking on the shore. Their noise was immense: a roar, like an animal, and then a deep, visceral boom which passed right through him. When the tide began its retreat again, sucked back into the sea, the pebbles became caught in the wash and he could hear a soft, chattering sound, as if thousands of voices were calling from beyond the sea wall. On the other side of the eight-foot wall was the village: old fishermen’s cottages, a pub, a few shops and businesses. This side of it were boats, lined up on the beach, masts chiming in the wind.

He adjusted the straps of the backpack and heard the equipment clatter around inside: the line, a new net he’d bought with the money from his paper round, and some old bacon his mum had given him that morning. He was carrying the bucket in his hand. It was early November, freezing cold, but winter was always the best time to go crabbing. In the winter there were no tourists – which meant he didn’t have to share the crabs.

The village was set in a bowl, with coves cut into the faces of the hills on either side. In order to get to the coves, you had to climb over a series of rocks that rose up out of the shingle at both ends of the beach. To the boy, the rocks – polished and hewed by the relentless power of the sea – looked like the tail of a dragon, the bulk of the
creature still submerged somewhere beneath. On the other side of the tail, in the coves beyond, hundreds of rock pools had formed in the grooves and chasms of the beach. That’s where the crabs would be; washed up and spat out by the tide.

The boy started the climb.

Carrying the bucket at the same time made it harder. Normally his dad hauled all the equipment for him, but he was away with work and had told the boy he was big enough now – at almost thirteen – to go by himself. ‘As long as you’re careful,’ his dad kept saying. The sea spray and the rain could make climbing more difficult but he was doing okay: after five minutes he’d got up on to the top of the tail and was looking down at the first of the coves. It was about thirty feet across by sixty feet deep, with a thin sliver of shingle running from the shoreline to where the hills at the back started their steep ascent. The rest was just rock pools, sea washing over them, foam bubbling in the clefts and rifts. He started down, bucket – gripped in his hand still – clattering against the rock, his eyes fixed on where he was placing his feet. Wind roared in, once, twice, pulling him around like it had reached out and grabbed him – but then he jumped the last few feet, on to the shingle, and the wind died instantly as he stepped into the protection of the cove. All he could hear now was the sea breaking on the beach behind him.

Placing the bucket down on the shingle, he removed his backpack, unzipped it and started taking out the equipment. Crab line. Short-handled net. Bait. He attached the bait to the line, grabbed the net and the bucket and made his way across the cove, to the rocks at the back.
As long
as you’re careful
. He placed his feet down just as deliberately as before, not wanting to have to explain to his dad how he had managed to snap the line, or cut himself, or both. Halfway across, he heard the sea crash again behind him, an even louder and longer roar than previously, and when he looked back he saw a wave rolling in towards him. He wasn’t worried about getting wet, but he
was
worried about getting knocked over, so he reached forward and grabbed hold of a thin column of stone. The sea washed in, almost knee high, soaking his trousers and boots, and flattening out in the space ahead of him. Once it started drawing out again, he looked to the backpack and saw it was safe, perched in a high groove where he’d placed it after getting the equipment out. He headed to the rock pools right at the back of the cove where it would be too far for the sea to reach him. There, he could drop the line into the pools without fear of being soaked a second time. High tide had been an hour ago. The waves may have been loud, may have been fierce, but they were slowly retreating. In another hour, they’d be weakened. An hour after that, they’d hardly make it to him at all.

He placed the bucket down next to him, made sure the bait was secure and then sat next to the deepest rock pool in the cove. It was about ten feet down. The boy dropped the line in, feeding it out of a box his dad had made for him. It was like a fishing reel, with a small handle on the side that he could use to draw the line back in. He held the box with his left hand, and let the line run over the first two fingers of his right hand so he could feel any movement, however slight, if a crab went for the bait.

Then he noticed something.

Twenty feet away from him, right at the back of the cove, between the last of the rock pools and the sharp incline of the hill, it looked like someone had left some bait behind. He shifted on the rock, trying to get a better view from where he was sitting, but all he could see was a white slab of meat. Chicken maybe, or pork. His dad always said bacon was best, but the boy had caught loads of crabs with pieces of old chicken. Oily fish was good too, but not as good as meat. Crabs generally weren’t fussy eaters, but if the bacon didn’t get them interested, the boy figured he could use the bait left behind as a back-up plan. If someone hadn’t taken it with them, they obviously wouldn’t miss it.

But as he turned back to the hole, he realized there was even more of the bait, on top of the rocks in front of him, about five feet above his eye line. This time he scanned the whole cove. Within a couple of seconds he could see the same bait in three other places: to his right, down towards the shoreline; at a diagonal from him, in a gully; and one more immediately behind him, wedged in a fracture in the rocks about ten feet away.

He placed the line box down – securing it in a crevice it couldn’t escape from – and got to his feet. The surface down to the nearest bait, the one behind him, was slick with seawater. He took a couple of careful steps, then dropped down on to his backside and slid the rest of the way. Up close, he could see that the bait was wrapped in plastic – like the type he kept his bacon in – and the meat inside had been cut into five thin strips. They were
much too long and impractical for crabbing – even the boy knew that – which must have been why they’d been left here. Whoever had tried using them hadn’t had much success.

He reached forward to pick them up.

But stopped.

One of the strips of meat had a shell attached to it. He leaned in closer. They
all
had shells attached to them: in the same place, right at the end. He glanced between his hand – still hovering over the plastic covering – and the strips of meat inside; back and forth, as if his mind had made some sort of a connection but he didn’t realize what it was.

Then a second later it hit him.

A whimper sounded in his throat as he scuffled back on his hands, reversing as far from the bait as he could get himself. He tried to gain purchase on the rocks but his feet kept slipping, the heels of his boots sliding off the surface. ‘Dad!’ he yelled, an automatic reaction, even though his dad was at work, miles away, and the boy was out here on his own where no one would hear him. ‘
Dad
!’ he screamed again, tears forming in his eyes as he desperately tried to claw his way back up to where he’d left his line.

Thirty seconds later he got there – but he didn’t stop for the line. He didn’t stop for his bait, his bucket, or his backpack either. He just clambered across the rocks, back over the dragon’s tail, and ran as fast as he could along the shingle to his house at the end of the sea wall. His mum was in the kitchen, organizing cakes for his sister’s
birthday, and when she looked at the boy, at his tears, at the wide-eyed terror in his eyes, she grabbed him, brought him in close and made him recount what he’d seen. And he told her.

How the shells had been fingernails.

How the strips of meat had been fingers.

And how the bait had been a hand.

Half a mile away, as the boy was telling his mother what he’d found, Colm Healy pulled his Vauxhall up alongside a cottage he’d been staying at for the past five months. On the passenger seat were two shopping bags. He grabbed them, got out and headed inside.

After putting the food away and making himself a coffee, he sat at the window and smoked a cigarette. The view, even in the middle of winter, was beautiful: the gentle curve of the shingle beach; a long line of pastel-coloured fishermen’s cottages; the high sea wall and the masts rising up from behind it. Sea spray dotted the glass, and wind cut in from the sea, swirling and buffeting the cottage – yet, to Healy, after twenty-six years in the Met, and even longer in the city, this was as close to silence as he had ever known.

A minute later the silence broke.

On the table in front of him, his phone started buzzing, quietly turning circles. He didn’t have a ring tone these days, which he preferred because it meant he missed a lot of calls. His ex-wife. The people he’d worked with. Men and women from his old life he’d happily never see again. But there was always a risk he might miss the one call he cared about: the call from his boys. So he brought the phone towards him and turned it over.

Liz Feeny.

He thought about letting it go to voicemail. Any conversation with Feeny was a conversation without a conclusion. She’d been phoning him constantly for the past three months, looking for any kind of closure, any kind of answer. But there wasn’t one.

There was no happy ending.

He pushed Answer and flicked to speakerphone. ‘Liz.’

‘Healy.’

Her voice was soft. It sounded like she’d already been crying. ‘This isn’t really a good time,’ he said, lying. He looked around the kitchen. Dishes were stacked up in the sink. Cereal boxes were left on the worktops. ‘I’m right in the middle of something here.’

‘Why do you still answer my calls?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When David described you, he always said you were difficult to break down. Angry. Aloof. When I first started calling you, that was the man I expected to find.’

Healy didn’t say anything.

‘But I’ve never
found
that man.’ She paused. ‘You’ve never been like that. I know you hate talking to me, but you still answer my calls.’ Another pause, this time for longer. She sniffed, stopped, sniffed again. ‘Why do you answer my calls, Colm?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Do you feel sorry for me – is that it?’

There was nothing in the question, no malice, but there was no right answer: yes, and she clung on to it and used it as some kind of excuse to call him more often; no, and he was telling her never to call again.
So? If you hate her calling
so much, just tell her.
Except he couldn’t do that. Because, deep down, he wasn’t sure he
did
hate her calling.