Final Demand (23 page)

His window was up on the seventh floor, on a level with the motorway. Traffic was heavy, leaving London for the weekend. It passed soundlessly – a Sainsbury's lorry, a tow-truck carrying a bulldozer. The man said he would set her some simple tests – numeracy, problem-solving – and asked what software she had used.

‘I seem to have no address for you,' he said.

‘I'm between flats at the moment.' Natalie gave him her mobile number.

On Monday he called and said she had performed excellently in the test, her CV looked satisfactory, all he needed now was a reference from her last place of employment.

That night she phoned Phillip Tomlinson from a call-box. In the distance she could hear a child crying.

‘I want you to write me a reference,' she said. ‘To whom it may concern, one of those.'

‘Where are you?' he hissed.

‘I'm going to give you a box number. Got a pen? Send it there.'

‘Natalie!'

‘Write it for Tracey Batsford, that's Tracey with an e.'

‘But Natalie—'

‘Don't ask any questions. And if you don't send it, I'll tell your wife about us.'

There was a silence. Then the line went dead.

A moment later she phoned again. ‘A good reference, of course.
Glowing.
Bye!'

Two weeks later she started work.
Bob's your uncle
, as Mr Wigton said, for just as she hoped, not everyone bothered to write ‘T.B. Computer Services' on their cheques. Lazy sods.

This time, however, the stakes were higher. Not just for obvious reasons, like maybe the police were catching up on her. As there were no large accounts to absorb the deficit, there was a greater risk of discovery.

Who cares? thought Natalie, tossing her blonde hair. If they discover something wrong, I'll just disappear. I've done it before and I can do it again. Tracey Batsford will vanish, as if she never existed. Who cares what happens to the real one, my shadowy double, wherever she is?

She gazed at the cheque in her hand. It was for £1,220. I won't do it often, she thought, I'm not greedy. Once a month, maybe. After all, a girl's got to live.

It was a large, airy room, glass on all sides. There were six other people there, gazing at their screens. She didn't know their names; they had hardly spoken, except to say ‘hello' and ‘goodbye'. In this place, there was none of the camaraderie of NuLine. That was fine. That was the last thing she wanted.

Outside, startlingly close, the cars sped past. An airbus headed towards Heathrow. Ten minutes along the M4 and she too could be at the airport, flying off to a new life – Rome, Melbourne, Johannesburg. None of them sounded real, but then nothing seemed real any more.

Copper-coloured clouds were heaped up; they glowed from beneath, as if the city were on fire. Natalie gazed at the cheque and took out her biro.

She had done it before, often enough. She could do it again. Why, then, was her heart hammering?

‘
I DON
'
T BELIEVE
it,' said David. ‘What have you been
doing
?'

‘I do appreciate your frustration,' said Detective-Superintendent Cobb.

‘Frustration?' David stared at him.

‘But, as I told you last week . . .' And the week before, and the week before that. The man wouldn't leave them alone. ‘We're following up every lead, there have been several new developments, promising ones.' He had a headache; the room was stifling. Tragedy catapulted strangers into his life with a terrible intimacy. This particular case had affected him deeply, he could admit it. He was weary with the sorrow of it. He had lied: they had no new leads. DNA tests on known offenders had all proved negative. How he longed for Sunday, when he would see the eager, lit faces of his grandchildren. ‘We'll keep you informed, you can be sure of that.' If he got up to open the window, maybe David Milner would take the hint and leave.

‘He's there somewhere,' said David. ‘He's out there somewhere. Christ, he must be laughing at us.'

‘I don't think—'

‘Leave it to me and
I
could find him.'

David got up abruptly and left.

The detective turned to his colleague, Angela. ‘Wonder how his wife's coping,' he said.

‘All that rage,' she replied. ‘And nowhere for it to explode.'

‘Except here.'

She gazed at the open door. Far down the corridor, they heard another door slam. ‘There goes a man who's capable of murder,' she said.

David had been given notice to quit. This was inevitable. He had felt no surprise when the men from the brewery had walked in and laid their briefcases on the table.

‘We are aware of your family circumstances and have taken them into account; we offer you our sympathy, but you must also be aware that we cannot support a business that has been constantly failing. Besides which, the tenancy agreement is for a couple, and now that you're on your own . . .'

They hadn't added anything about drinking during working hours, an occupational hazard but one which the brewery took seriously. This had already been the subject of two phone calls and a warning e-mail from divisional office.

It wasn't true, of course. David had conducted himself with perfect propriety but he hadn't the will to argue. On 5 October they were closing the pub for renovations; they planned to gut the place and theme it, some Frog and Filkin garbage but he hadn't listened, it was no longer a concern of his. This part of his life was over and he just needed to concentrate on packing up and getting the hell out of there.

So much rubbish – bags and bags of it. Dismantling a home seemed to spawn the stuff. He remembered his sixth-form Macbeth:
Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?
It was not as if they owned any furniture; they had always lived in rented premises.

‘You've got a good pair of lungs on you,' he told Paddy, dumping down a pile of LPs. ‘Buddy Holly, Van Morrison, take your pick, take the lot!' David sprang upstairs, two at a time, and fetched some more. Staggering under the weight of them, all those stupid songs, he carried them downstairs. But Paddy had gone.

Sheila appeared from nowhere. Had she phoned? Her mouth looked pinched, as if she had been sucking something bitter.
Blow-job lips
, David had once called them. With mild surprise, he realized that in the early years she used to suck his cock on a regular basis. She took it tenderly in her mouth, cupping his balls in her hand.

‘What did you say?' She looked at him oddly. Had he spoken out loud?

Sheila laid her hand briefly on his shoulder, like a sorrowing schoolteacher with a disappointing pupil, and disappeared into Chloe's room. A while later she came out, dragging yet more plastic sacks.

‘I'm giving her things to Kayleigh,' she said. ‘I hope that's all right.'

Who the hell was Kayleigh?

‘My niece,' she replied.

He must have spoken out loud again. Or maybe she was a mind-reader.

‘What about the photos in the bathroom?' she asked. ‘The collage.'

‘Take them.'

‘You can look at them whenever you want. All the photos. You can have anything you want.'

‘I don't want anything,' said David.

They stood there in the corridor. It seemed too narrow for them both.

‘I'm worried about you,' she said.

‘I'm fine. I'll drive the stuff there tomorrow.' Her brother Terence had offered his garage for storage. ‘Some day you'll have a house, you'll find somebody else.'

‘David!'

‘Plenty more
fritto misto
in the sea.'

‘
Fritto misto
?'

‘Fried fish – Venice, remember? The waiter looked like that actor, in that TV thing, the thing with the vet . . .' He ran out of steam.

‘What are you going to do, David? Why're you getting rid of all your stuff?'

‘Don't worry about me.'

There was a pause. Down in the street a lorry blared its horn. ‘I think you should see someone,' she said. ‘Just to talk.'

He looked at her. ‘What've you done to your hair?'

She made a small noise in her throat and turned away. Her hair was darker, and cut shorter. Less grey in it. He could see her neck.

‘Know something?' David said. ‘We should have gone on more holidays.' But it was too late, because just then her sister arrived to take her away.

When on earth had they used the tea cups? They had been left to Sheila by her Aunty something-or-other, cups and saucers patterned with roses. Throughout their marriage the tea service had accompanied them from home to home – the early years in Morecambe when he was involved in that doomed enterprise, band management and when Chloe had had a plastic beaker, with a spout. Later years in Manchester, first at the Bull and Bush and then at the Queen's Head. Unused, the cups and saucers existed in a parallel, ghostly universe where guests arrived for Battenberg cake and Chloe, slim and pretty, had passed eight O levels.

David wrapped up the cups and put them in a cardboard box. He put his mind to it, concentrating on the task. One sheet of newspaper per cup, folded double exactly down the centre, then scrunched into the cup and the whole thing rolled in another sheet. Finally the ends had to be tucked in. It was important to get it right. If he folded the paper slightly off-centre then the ends didn't align and he could feel the panic rising, heating up his face.

Half an hour had passed and he had done nothing. David roused himself and picked up another sheet of newspaper. It was an old copy of the
Yorkshire Post.
Spreading it out, words caught his eye.
Phone Girl Charged with Fraud.

Later he wondered: Why did he notice it? Was it the word
phone?
Or was it just that he didn't have the energy to carry on?
Thirty-two-year-old Natalie Taylor, of Her on Drive, Selby Road, Leeds, appeared at Leeds Magistrates Court yesterday charged with fraud, deception and handling. An employee of NuLine Telecommunications, it was alleged that she had altered payment
cheques by substituting her own name. A NuLine spokesman said, ‘As a precautionary measure, it has always been our policy to urge customers to write out our full name on cheques when paying their phone bills, or if possible use direct debit.
'

Sheila could make no sense of the phone call. David must have been drunk.

‘Don't you understand?' His voice rose in his excitement. ‘That was why we were cut off! Don't you see, Sheila?' She knew that hectoring tone so well. He started babbling about some woman who lived in Leeds. ‘It was her!'

‘Who?'

He said he had rung NuLine but they wouldn't talk to him. ‘I said I was a customer and all I got was fucking Vangelis. I said I wanted to talk to someone but all I got was fucking
I'm Sheila, how can I help you
?'

‘
I'm
Sheila.'

‘I said I was the father of the murdered girl.'

The murdered girl.
David had never said the words before. Sheila gazed through the window. A gale was blowing; out in the garden, Fiona's weeping willow swayed like weeds in a river.

‘David,' she said, ‘you're talking gibberish.' Fiona came in from the kitchen, drying her hands, and raised her eyebrows. ‘I don't understand what you're saying.'

‘It was her fault!' shouted David's voice. ‘She stole my cheque. That's why we were cut off. It was her fault that it happened.'

The next day, Saturday, David drove to Leeds. It only took an hour from Manchester but when he arrived, and drove out east on the Selby Road, he couldn't find the street. Heron Drive wasn't on the map. He stopped at a newsagent's. The man didn't recognize the name but a customer buying some fags said: ‘It's that new, up-its-own-arse estate. Son of a bloke I know, he's bought a condo there.'

He gave David directions. David arrived there, and drove
along the toy town streets of the housing development. A man pushed a little girl, wearing a silver crown, on her trike.

The Sales Office was a Portakabin draped with a banner: PHASE TWO NOW AVAILABLE. Flags hung limply from a row of poles. David went inside. The office was empty, though a phone was ringing on the desk. It rang and rang – a low, insistent warble.

When he was a boy he was given a toy phone: red plastic, with a string connecting the two parts.

‘
Ring ring
,' he said, and passed the receiver to his mother. ‘
It's for you
.'

‘
Who is it?
' his mother asked.

‘
I don't know
.'

‘
What should I say?
' She gazed at the receiver in her hand.

He gave up. ‘
I don't know!
'

Suddenly he realized what it was: a piece of plastic, with no voice inside at all.

The phone was still ringing. It must be a matter of urgency but nobody arrived to answer it.
Wherever you are, whatever the time
. . . David gave up and went outside. Across the street, a man was washing his car.

‘Can you help me, mate?' asked David. ‘Know where a Natalie Taylor lives? I know it's Heron Drive but I don't know the number.'

‘Can't help you.' The man shook his head. ‘I'm new.'

David walked down Heron Drive. It was yet another row of raw brick houses. He longed for a drink. His body felt loose along the seams; only a Scotch would tighten it up and return him to himself.

‘Bang bang! You're dead.'

A little boy sat in a doorway. The barrel of his machine-gun was levelled at David.

‘I'm dead already,' said David. ‘Look.' He spread out his hands. His fingers trembled; he noticed this with vague interest.

‘Fall down then,' said the boy.

David asked him where Natalie Taylor lived.