Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) (13 page)

“I’m not like you. I’m no thief, and I’m definitely no bloody killer.” I saw the anger fire in his face, and it felt good. “I work with Veronica.”

“You don’t know the first thing about me. No idea what I did for you.”

I’d gotten what I wanted, the familiar way out of a meeting with my father. Blood and guts, fire and brimstone. I threw the letter back at him and stormed out of the caravan. It felt good.

I walked out to the front of the camp.

A large metal gateway had been built across the main entrance, and protesters were beginning to chain themselves to the metal while a line of police watched from the other side. Van tires were lined up behind the gate, forming a low barrier that would stop cars getting through. Someone had painted across them, in childish white writing, “home.” Out of sight from the police, behind a low wall, were four large gas canisters, all roped together like cells of a giant battery.

There were a dozen people milling around on the settlement side of the gate, most shouting abuse at the police as a couple of television cameras recorded news footage. None of the shouting people looked or sounded Romani; there was a distinct smell of middle class credit cards in their unwashed clothes, and their accents all belonged a hundred miles to the south.

“Looks good, yeah?”

I turned to face the voice. Its owner was chubby and looked not much older than twenty. His dark hair was cut into an ill-advised pageboy, and his face was made rounder by a pair of small circular glasses. His clothes were a size too large, and he was self-consciously hiding behind a brown canvas satchel. He was holding a small notebook in his left hand, but I couldn’t see a pen.

“Let me guess.” I gave him my best Clint Eastwood stare-down. “You’re a blogger.”

“Journalist.”

“Right.”

“And you’re Aaron’s son, the one he always talks about.”

I had him wrong. He wasn’t a writer, he was a comedian.

“I don’t know about that last part, but yeah, I’m his son.”

“I’ve been writing stories about your dad, trying to get people from outside to see what a hero he is, why this place is important.”

“For a newspaper?”

“Blog.”

“Right.”

I looked back at the gate where people were working to build up the defenses. It was beginning to look like every camp siege in every news story. I realized there was a plan for this sort of thing, for how to draw the most media attention. People had worked out the best place to put things for the camera. I started to doubt their motives.

“What are you here for?”

“I told you, I’m writing—”

“No.” I pointed out beyond the gate at the cops and cameras. “I know why they’re here. And I know why the people who live here are here. But why are you here? All of you? Is this what kids do instead of gap years now?”

He didn’t take to confrontation well. His face flushed, and I saw his fingers twitching. “I thought you’d be glad of the support.”

“You don’t want support for this settlement, you want a story. You want a war. And when you’re all done the people here will give you one, and the whole world will see it on TV for ten seconds, between some celebrity shite and the football, and then in another year there will be another one.”

“Just trying to make a difference.”

“How many of these evictions have you written about?”

“I did both the Irish traveler camps that got turned over last year, so this will be the third.”

I noticed the
will be.

“And the first two, you manage to make anything go differently?”

He eyed me for a couple seconds and I figured out he was looking for a weak spot, trying to think of a way to push me back in my place. He went with, “Your dad’s right about you. You’re an angry young man.”

Was that the best he could do?

“I’m not young.”

I went to walk past him, and he stepped aside quicker than I had thought possible.

I paused for a second. “Wait. The shit my dad pulled last night, visiting the council members. You got him the addresses, right?”

He grinned, thinking he had me back onside. “Good trick, right? We’ll get a good story out of that one, probably get it in the
Guardian
. Hey, you heading into Wolverhampton, can you give me a lift?”

“No.”

Shit to do, shit to do.

The clock was ticking on the cartel’s threat to Gaines, and I’d been wasting time playing catch-up with my old man. I took the direct route back to the city, along the M54 motorway. During the morning and evening rush hours this could be a concrete strip of hell, but it only took people to and from work; at midday I had the road to myself.

I called Matt at work and told him to be outside in twenty minutes with Simon’s address. I hung up before he could give me any objections. I found him standing outside the sports hall, scrunched up in his jacket as if he was bracing against a cold wind. He’d told me once that cold hurt him, that ever since he’d cleaned up, the wind cut right through his joints. He never went outside without at least three layers on, and even then he would cower into the clothes, terrified of the cold. I slowed the car without killing the engine, and he climbed in.

“If I ask you any questions,” he said. “You’re going to say that I don’t want to know, right?”

“Try me.”

“What’s going on?”

“You don’t want to know.”

He laughed. “See, when I say something that sounds like a question at the end? Means I want to know. What’s going on?”

I’d decided not to trust anyone. But Matt wasn’t anyone. I could give him an edited version of the truth. “Okay, listen. Jelly got some information, and he tried to blackmail Veronica Gaines with it. He tried to do the same with an even bigger fish, a group from abroad, and now he’s missing and the information is out there somewhere.”

“You mean missing or
missing
?”

I shrugged. “Both.”

He sat and processed this while we waited for traffic lights to change. Then he scratched his hair and tugged on it, pulling a face. He didn’t take bad news well. He’d never developed a coping mechanism for stress that didn’t involve better living through chemistry, so bad news always seemed to knock the wind out of him.

“Thing is, we both knew—know—Jelly. I can’t see him settling for some tacky photography-slash-porn business in the middle of bum-fuck-nowhere. And I say that as someone who used to live in Wednesbury. Whatever it is he’s hooked up with your man Simon for, it’s got to be something more than a day job at Studio Noir.”

“So you think Simon’s in on the blackmail.”

I nodded. “I tried the shop, but I think Simon is going to be similarly unavailable for comment.” I watched Matt tug at the front of his hair again. “So the next best thing is to try his house and see if I can find anything there to clue me in.”

“Simon’s house?” Matt stopped pulling at his hair. “Wouldn’t it make sense if we tried Jelly’s place first?”

I looked across at him, then back at the road, then back across at him again. “You know where he lives?”

“Sure.”

“Then why the fuck—”

“You never asked.”

If Matt had told me where Jelly lived in advance, I might have changed my mind about going. Instead I let him direct me step by step, and realized too late that he’d led me onto the Moat Farm estate in Tipton.

Tipton lies in the heart of the Black Country, halfway between Birmingham and Wolverhampton. There was a time when it was said to have more canals than roads, and many Romani families settled there after the work on the boats went away. The skies back then had been full of the smoke of local factories and foundries, but all signs of the industrial glory days were long gone.

The Moat Farm estate had been built to provide social housing for the working class in the thirties. And like most social housing projects, it was cramped, small, and located far away from all the nicer neighborhoods. It had been built on a desolate patch of land, cut off from the rest of Tipton on three sides by train tracks and canals. Its isolation had earned it the nickname Lost City. What had started out as a nickname based on geography gained a sick meaning after the town hit the skids: it was a fitting label for the lost generations housed on the estate. A lot of work had gone into cleaning it up over the last twenty years, including building newer houses and more roads onto the estate, but to paraphrase a song by the Selecter, there are certain things that are just too hard to forget. As we turned onto the estate and drove along its winding maze of roads, we passed way too many children for one in the afternoon, and they weren’t even in uniform. These kids were on a permanent lunch break.

Matt directed me onto a quiet cul-de-sac lined with depressing two- and three-story apartments, all painted the same shade of gray. Laundry hung from balconies, and stair rails led down to ragged yards and concrete patios.

Last time I was in a building like one of these, it blew up.

And that’s only a slight exaggeration.

I parked between two vans, hoping to be the least noticeable thing in the street, and Matt led me up a set of stairs. As we approached the door of Jelly’s place, I wondered about his house keys. They hadn’t been in his pockets or on the floor near his body, but his wallet had been there. I doubted he would have gone to a hotel tryst without his house keys. Someone must have gone through his pockets before me. I stepped forward and tried the door handle a couple of times, putting some weight into it.

Matt stepped back. “Not going to knock?”

I knocked on the door theatrically to humor him. I stepped back and pretended to wait for movement inside.

“You already know, don’t you?” Matt gave me a look. “You said in the car he was both kinds of missing, and now you’re not waiting to see if he’s in there before trying the door. What have you done to him?”

That hurt. Matt had seen me do some dodgy things but I’d thought he trusted me more than that. “I didn’t do anything to him.” I skated by on the lie; in my head it was true, because all I’d done was dispose of his body after the fact. “If I had killed him, don’t you think I’d have his keys? Someone got to him before I could help, and I need to find whatever it was they were after before they come back again.”

He waved to the door handle again, giving me permission to carry on, but he didn’t look convinced. I put my weight back into the door but it wasn’t for moving it. The wood of the doorframe had been varnished recently, but beneath the varnish were older scratches and chips near the lock. This flat had been broken into in the past, and that gave me an advantage because some of the wood had already been cleared away. It looked like a cylindrical lock, which meant it would be a piece of piss. I slipped two bankcards out of my wallet and put them together, doubling the strength. I pushed them into the gap between the wood and the door, at an angle at first, until I got purchase. While the cards looked for a gap to slide into, I put my foot against the base of the door, pushing my weight into it. Sure enough, the door gave a little. Nobody ever shuts their front door gently; they’ll let it slam, or kick it shut while they carry shopping. Often the security feature that needs the most care is the most overlooked, and over time it all adds up to a loose door. With the gap I’d created, I could wiggle the cards in to push between the door and the metal strike pad set into the doorframe, until they connected with the latch.

“Someone might see.” Matt was looking behind us, down at the road. “They might call the cops.”

“Nobody gives a shit. Look around. The cops don’t come out here, anyway.”

I pushed the cards further inward, and soon they were easing the latch out of the strike pad, slipping it back into the door. It didn’t need to go all the way in, just enough to—

Click.

There.

The door swung inward. The hallway was dim. At the far end was an open doorway into the kitchen at the rear of the flat. I could see a sink and a window above it, with daylight streaming in. To my left was a staircase, and on the right was a closed door. There was woodchip on the walls. Jelly had never struck me as a Pulp fan.

The most noticeable thing was the smell: cats and urine. Matt pushed past me, clucking and calling, making that noise like a lazy rattlesnake that seems to be the universal human greeting for a cat. He stooped down just inside the kitchen doorway and started fussing over something out of sight. I followed and peered down over his shoulder at two skinny kittens hiding beneath a small table. They looked underfed and had scratches on their faces where it looked like they’d gotten rough with each other. On the table was a box full of cat food, still sealed. The box was scratched and torn, but the food had remained out of reach.

Matt ripped open the box.

“Hello,” he said. “You hungry? Yes.” His voice was morphing into baby talk. “You’re hungry. Let’s see what we’ve got, shall we. Yes.”

They forgot their shyness and ran headfirst into his legs, rubbing against him as he looked for plates.

“Matt, you’re talking to cats.”

“Uncle Eoin doesn’t think I should talk to you. Tell him what you think. Yeah. That’s it. Who wants some fuss?”

I left them to it and explored the rest of the flat.

The other door off the hallway led to a small living room with a flat-screen television and a couple of fake leather sofas. Pushed against the wall were two wooden shelving units filled with books and DVDs, and I didn’t fancy going through them, looking for clues. I noticed a laptop power cable coiled on the floor beside the nearest sofa but couldn’t see any other sign of the computer it belonged to.

Back in the hallway I noticed an Internet hub plugged into the phone socket. A light on it flashed every few seconds. I called out for Matt to join me, interrupting the one-way conversation he was having with the cats about how hungry they were, and pointed at the hub.

“Is that transmitting to something? That what the lights mean?”

He scratched his head. “Well, it’s transmitting, but the light doesn’t mean anything’s being received, just that it’s sending out a signal. Or— Wait.” He pulled out his smartphone and pressed a few buttons, holding the phone between us before nodding at something on the screen. “It’s a local network. So there could be something else in the flat that’s on the network.”

“Like his laptop.”

“Sure. But for someone to have a network usually means they’re sharing information across a lot of devices. Otherwise, it’s pointless. Computer, printer, TV, backup devices.”

“Backup what?”

I bent down and switched the hub off at the wall, waited a second and switched it back on. It clicked and blinked as it found the Internet again. Then the lights changed as it reconnected to the network. I thought I heard something click somewhere upstairs. Matt nodded to tell me he’d heard it too.

At the top of the stairs I found a small landing with three doors opening off it. Two of them were closed but the third lay open, revealing a cramped bathroom and a litter tray full to the brim with cat shit and litter clumped together with piss.

No wonder they’d hid beneath the table.

The next door along was to the bedroom, but there was nothing in it but a metal-frame bed surrounded by dirty socks and used tissues. I bent down for a look beneath the bed but it was just more of the same mess.

The next room was completely empty, nothing but bare white walls, a thin blue carpet, and a cheap electric heater about a foot up from the ground on one wall. It seemed suspiciously empty.

I stepped back out to the landing and called down for Matt to reset the hub again. He was already deep into another conference with the kittens. I heard him step out into the hallway and restart the hub then caught the sound again: the clicking of something reconnecting with the network. It was coming from the empty room.

I stepped back into the room and looked for the source of the noise, but it had already stopped. I scanned the empty space a couple times before I caught what was wrong. There were no power sockets. I called for Matt to reset the hub again and this time I was well placed to track down the source of the noise. It was coming from behind the electric heater. I slipped the switches on the heater but didn’t get any response. I gripped it at either end and pulled.

It lifted straight away from the wall. It was an empty shell.

Behind it was a shelf set back into an alcove in the wall, which was stacked with bags of pills, a cash tin, and a gun. On the floor beneath the shelf was an external hard drive plugged into a power socket.

Crafty bastard.

I flipped open the cash tin and found a roll of twenties. I slipped it into my coat pocket. Then I picked up the gun and slipped it into the waist of my jeans at the small of my back, like the action hero I wasn’t. I noticed my hand shook as it hovered over the pills, but I left them where they were. I bent down and unplugged the hard drive and carried it over to the door. As I headed toward the top of the stairs I could hear Matt talking to the kittens again.

Then I heard someone else’s voice and froze.

He wasn’t talking to the kittens.

He was talking to Branko.

Shit.

Shit.

I heard Branko call out, “Mr. Miller, are you going to join us for a drink?”