Gone Cold (22 page)

It suddenly occurred to me why Ostermann had been so eager to deliver the news to Welker’s widow personally.

“Becky,” I said. “Please tell me you didn’t.”

“Of course not. I gave her a shoulder to cry on, nothing more.” He scoffed. “Is that really what you think of me, Simon? That I’d sleep with my friend’s widow before his body had gone cold?”

“I’d hope not,” I said.

“Good.” He lifted his pint with a smug grin. “Because with a woman like Becky Welker, one must take his time to lay a foundation.”

I produced my BlackBerry and dialed Wendy Isles. The call went straight to voice mail so I left a message for her to call me back as soon as possible.

“So,” Ostermann said, “we wait for Wendy to call you so that she can assist us in gaining access to surveillance footage here in London. We wait for Eli Welker’s final client to e-mail me so that we can meet with him, learn his identity, and find out why he hired Welker to track Shauna Adair to Dublin. That seems to me a fair amount of waiting. What do we do in the meantime?”

“Try to find this so-called ‘father’ of Shauna’s, I suppose.”

“Do we have anything at all to go on?”

“Nothing but a book of matches, I’m afraid.”

“Matches?”

“Lennox Sterling told me that when Shauna comes back from London after meeting with her father, she sometimes has a book of matches on her. From a pub in the East End. He doesn’t know if there’s any connection, but I figure it’s worth a shot.”

“You have an address?”

“No address. Sterling only remembered the name.”

“What’s the name of this pub, then?”

“The Night’s End.”

Ostermann shrugged. “You ask me, the End is always a good place to start.”

Chapter 45

TWELVE YEARS AGO

It’s three
A.M.
and I’m sitting on a barstool at Terry’s, working on my fourth or fifth pint of Harp. I’m tired. No, more than that, defeated. I’m utterly lost.

“Hand them over,” Terry says. Only in his stubborn cockney accent it sounds like
’and them ova
.

I don’t need to ask what he’s referring to. I dig into the front pocket of my jeans and pull out my keys, slide them across the bar. I had no intention of driving anyway.

I’d arrived at the pub only an hour ago after Terry cleared the place out following last call. I’ve no desire to interact with people. There are enough of them still camped out in front of my house, day and night. Enough of them still inside my home as well. Though that number has greatly dwindled. A sure sign that Rendell’s hopes continue to dwindle as well.

Terry opens the register and places my keys in the drawer. “You have your house keys?” he asks.

My laugh sounds more like a grunt. “You think Tash and I are locking our doors these days, Terry? What the hell would we do that for? The only thing we had to protect is gone.”

“Missing,” he says. “They’ll find her, Simon.”

I know better than to respond, than to engage my only real friend in that senseless circular conversation yet again.

I lift the pint to my lips. These are my first drinks since Hailey was taken. That I’m drinking at all is a sure sign to everyone, Terry included, that I’ve all but given up hope myself. I never drink more than a pint or two. Never enough to get drunk. And if there were any reason at all for me to wake up early tomorrow morning, sober and ready to take on the day, I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be home. In bed. With Tasha. Where I belong.

“Is she faring any better?” Terry says. Except that glottal stops replace the letter
t
so that
better
sounds a hell of a lot more like
be’er
.

“She gets worse every day. We both do. But Tash, I barely recognize her anymore.”

In the past two weeks my wife has gone from being a vibrant young mother to a desolate shell of flesh and bone. She’s lost at least ten pounds, and she didn’t have even five to spare. She spends her days in a chemical funk, popping benzodiazepines like they were sunflower seeds. When she isn’t eating tranquilizers she’s snacking on muscle relaxers, hoping to fall asleep. She’s been to the emergency room twice for extreme lower back pain and been prescribed powerful opioids, which she keeps in her pocket at all times. When this began, I tried to talk to her about it. But as with everything else, I’ve since thrown in the towel.

“I take it her parents haven’t been helpful?”

“They’ve done what they can. For the first time since I met them, I can’t complain about their behavior.”

“Even your mother-in-law?” Only he replaces the
th
sound with a
v
, and the final
r
vanishes completely, making mother-in-law sound like
muvva-in-law
.

“Even my mother-in-law.”

“How about your own dad?”

I smirk without meaning to. It’s been ten days now since Alden Fisk was cleared and not twenty-four hours have gone by without his calling, asking whether he can come by to help out. I’ve assured him it isn’t necessary, made clear his presence was something neither Tasha nor I wanted, but he refuses to relent.

“Two days ago, I stopped taking his calls,” I say.

Everything we’d been told had checked out. My father had indeed left Providence for Virginia Beach then gone on to Raleigh to carry on with a married woman not much older than me.

“If he means well,” Terry says, “maybe you should have him by.”

“If that’s the kind of advice you’re going to give, I’m going to take my business elsewhere.”

“Do you think there’s any chance he’ll just show up?”

“Enough,” I say, louder and angrier than I mean to. “I don’t want to discuss Alden Fisk. Not with you, not with anybody.”

“I apologize,” he says.

But I’ve known Terry long enough to know he’s offended. Thing is, with all this beer in me, I’m having trouble caring.

“I’m just making conversation,” he adds. “Trying to understand the situation.”

“Well, don’t.” I immediately regret saying it but it’s as though someone or some
thing
else is controlling my tongue. “There
is
no understanding it, Terry. It’s the Ninth Circle of Hell. Unless you’ve lost a child, you can’t comprehend the first thing about it. So just don’t bother trying, all right?”

An uncomfortable silence hangs over the bar.

“I
have
lost a child,” he says finally. “A daughter, in fact. Every bit as beautiful as Hailey.”

I look up at him, study his pained expression, wondering how in all this time he could possibly have been harboring such a secret.

He says, “I’ve told you, I believe, of me boyhood mate, Avery.”

I nod. “The one who became a solicitor.”

“A solicitor, right. Avery York his name was.”

I recall him telling me about Avery, the London lawyer who reminds me a lot of my father. Terry and he grew up together in London during the forties and fifties. They’d had everything in common, even having been born in the same month of the same year. Both boys came from working-class families. Both possessed an absent father and a mother who wasn’t entirely stable, mentally. They lived in the same neighborhood, attended the same schools for both their primary and secondary education. Both were good students who maintained top marks. They were equally athletic, equally competitive. They had the same color eyes, same color hair. When they reached full size, Terry was slightly taller at six one, Avery slightly more muscular. In their mid to late teens they’d dated twin sisters for several years.

Only when they were in their twenties did their paths finally diverge.

Terry and Avery had both been attending the law school at Newcastle University. One night while at an on-campus party thrown by undergraduates, they’d gotten into a row with a pair of rugby players from Northumbria University. Avery, drunk as an Irishman as Terry puts it, started the row, but it was Terry who finished it. Terry broke one rugby player’s cheekbone with a fist and fractured the other’s jaw with a kick, the latter coming well after any potential threat had been thwarted.

Both Terry and Avery were arrested but only Terry was charged. Only Terry was convicted of causing grievous bodily harm. Only Terry was sentenced to two and a half years. Not terribly long considering what he faced; the judge had used his discretion to go below the guidelines. But long enough that it spelled the end of his law-school career.

They remained friends throughout the ordeal and well beyond. But Terry’s life had taken a decidedly different turn from Avery’s.

Avery continued on at Newcastle and graduated with honors. He took a job with a large full-service London law firm and received a healthy signing bonus and an even healthier annual salary.

Meanwhile, Terry, as he tells it, used the connections he’d made at HMP Isis, a Young Offenders Institution in southeast London, and became “a pharmaceuticals salesman.” Primarily selling cocaine-based products.

Avery York, the big-time solicitor, went on to marry a young woman of some means.

Terrance Davies, the small-time gangster, impregnated a heroin-addled harlot.

He’d previously told me she’d lost the baby in her fifth month of pregnancy.

Confused, I say, “The fetus, you mean?”

Terry shakes his head and lets out an audible breath.

“No,” he says. “I’ve never been entirely honest about this because it’s something I’ve never really wanted to talk about, Simon. But the child was born healthy.”

His chin sinks into his chest and tears cloud his eyes.

“Once upon a time,” he says, “I had a little girl.”

Chapter 46

A Google search for “Night’s End” in London didn’t turn up any relevant hits. But before I could become too frustrated, I received a call back from Wendy Isles, who agreed to meet with me in the main lobby of the Corinthia.

“Needle in a haystack doesn’t even begin to describe the uselessness of London’s surveillance cameras in finding missing persons,” Wendy said. “Or in catching criminals, for that matter.”

Wendy ran a hand through her lustrous blond hair. Seated on a plush yellow sofa in the Corinthia Hotel’s opulent lobby and dressed in an impeccably tailored black Burberry suit, she could well have passed for a fashion model. In just the brief time we’d been sitting here, she’d turned more heads than Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic in the finals match on Centre Court at Wimbledon.

“Only the Borough of Newham even trialed facial recognition software,” she continued, “and it was an unmitigated failure. They inputted photos of countless local criminals over a period of years and the software failed to recognize a single one. This despite the fact that a number of those same convicted individuals were known to be living and lurking in the borough during all that time.”

“So it didn’t reduce crime,” I said.

“Oh, it reduced crime by more than a third. But only because everyone was scared out of their bloody wits that they were going to be captured live on camera. Little did they know, they had nothing to fear because the computer failed to lock on a solitary live target.”

“On the bright side, I suppose what you’re telling me negates the advantage Scotland Yard has in finding this young woman Shauna before I do.”

“Well, not completely, of course. You
are
one man, Simon. Last I checked, the Met employed over thirty thousand officers. Human beings still do
some
things better than computers after all. Especially in those numbers.”

“So the only way to find her on video is to know precisely where she was and at precisely what time beforehand.”

“That about sums it up. The half-million cameras in London may prevent some crimes simply because people realize that if the Met knows where and when a crime took place, chances are they can look at a picture of the perpetrator. By the same logic, the system is good for solving some crimes. It was useful after 7/7, and of course, just a few days ago, the Guards in Dublin caught on camera that little bitch who murdered Eli.”

I looked away, hoping Wendy missed any reaction that may have momentarily appeared on my face.

“But searching for a particular person who could be anywhere in all of London,” she said, “you might as well stand atop Big Ben with a telescope for all the luck you’ll have looking at surveillance videos.”

“All right, then.”

“So who’s this young woman Shauna you’re looking for?” she asked. “A runaway from the States?”

I debated how much to tell her. I wasn’t sure as to the nature and extent of her relationship with Eli Welker. She’d never responded to the e-mail I’d sent her from Dublin. And she made no mention of it today. It was possible she simply didn’t recognize Welker from the small passport photo I’d sent her. In which case, she probably didn’t know him all that well. But then, maybe she’d never even received the e-mail. Maybe it was delivered to her spam folder, or maybe it was opened and discarded by an assistant or someone else who worked at her firm. Maybe she simply hadn’t gotten to it yet. Or maybe she’d changed her e-mail address and I just wasn’t aware. In the past, whenever one of us needed the other’s assistance, we’d pick up the phone.

In any event, Wendy Isles clearly hoped Eli Welker’s killer would be caught. Imprisoned for life, if her tone of voice was any indication.

But would her thirst for blood be so insatiable if she knew that the killer might be my missing daughter?

Ultimately, I decided it was too dangerous to attempt to find out.

Chapter 47

TWELVE YEARS AGO

“Despite our very different lots in life, I think I’ve told you before, Avery and I remained close mates.”

“He came in handy, you said.”

“Right you are. When me and the boys would get into scrapes, we’d just call on our favorite barrister and Avery would come running.” He pours me a cup of coffee and pushes it across the bar. “There was never any jealousy, you understand. Things happen as they happen, and that’s the way they are. He felt no different toward me, nor I toward him.”