Running Girl (31 page)

‘If she was so scared, why did she get into his car?'

Singh took another breath. ‘I don't know.'

The chief continued to stare at him. ‘Who is the man in the car?'

‘I don't know that, either. But if we find out what happened after she got into that car on Thursday evening we'll find out what happened the next day at Pike Pond, I know it. I can guarantee it. I was right,' he added stubbornly, ‘about the black Porsche. No one believed me except ...'

‘Except who?' the chief said sharply.

Singh put the thought of Garvie Smith out of his mind. ‘Except the stepfather. He saw it when Chloe came home that night.'

He ran out of things to say, and stood, almost to attention, facing the chief.

For a full minute the chief eyeballed Singh and Singh returned his gaze. At last the chief took a step towards him, and brought his face up close to Singh's and said in a low, compressed voice, ‘Go to the press conference. Tell them what you've done.'

He turned away.

Singh said, ‘Does that mean ...? Can I ask if ...?' He cleared his throat. ‘Do I remain in charge of this investigation?'

‘I haven't decided yet,' the chief said, not troubling to turn round, and continued out of the office.

THERE WAS NOTHING
anyone could say or do to cheer him up. Not Smudge or Felix, for all their jokes and smokes at the Old Ditch Road playground. Not Jess with her pretty bare feet and slinky ways. Not even Abdul, who greeted him with characteristic eagerness every morning as Garvie trudged past his rank at the Bulwarks Lane shops.

‘My Garvie man, how is, how is?'

But all he'd get was a shake of the head and a few muttered words: ‘Is bad, Abdul,
très
bad.'

He didn't shun people, but he didn't talk much. When he smoked, he smoked as if he were alone, lost in the swirl of his thoughts as in the swirl of the marijuana smoke around his face.

The only person pleased by this change in him was Miss Perkins: his spirit was so broken that for three days running he attended all his timetabled lessons – including lunch-time and after-school revision classes. His mother should have been pleased too. But she was still barely speaking to him.

From time to time a memory would come unbidden into his mind: his mother weeping in her dressing gown. Like all his memories it was sharp and real, and as well as giving him pain it raised painful issues. She was right. He'd been playing a game. He'd treated Chloe's murder like a puzzle, a formal problem with interesting features, to be solved at his leisure and promptly forgotten, careless of the consequences. Almost as bad as the memory of his mother weeping was the image of Naylor hanging from the roof of his hut.

And now the fact that Chloe's death remained unsolved was terrible in a way it hadn't been before. The thought of it sat in his mind like a guilty secret.

Worst of all, he had to attend all these stupid revision classes. And so he plodded in and out of school, hardly talking.

Friday lunch time it was sunny, and Smudge and Felix went up to Top Pitch for a smoke, and Garvie sat with them, staring across the playing fields towards the city centre.

‘Seems to me,' Smudge said, ‘anyone could've worked out it wasn't Naylor that done it.'

Felix blew out smoke. ‘How's that?'

‘Well. It was just too obvious. It's all right for books. But it's never like that in real life.'

‘What do you know about real life, Smudge?'

They smoked in silence.

After a few minutes Smudge nodded in the direction of the school and said, ‘Here's a bit of real life I'd like to know more about.'

Jessica Walker was climbing the grassy slope towards them, pausing every so often to adjust the straps of her wedge sandals. She'd taken off her cardigan and tied it around her shoulders, and she was wearing sunglasses, very dark against her pale face.

‘Jess, girl, looks like you just come off set.'

Ignoring him, she walked over to Garvie. ‘Hey, Garv. Got a cig for me?'

Without looking he tossed over his pack and carried on gazing across the field, and she slipped off her shoes and settled down next to him and lit up.

‘Did you get my texts?'

He didn't say anything.

‘Come on, Garv. You can't brood for ever.'

He raised an eyebrow slightly.

‘You got to let it go.' She blew out smoke. ‘You can't bring her back. Even if you had ... you know. Feelings for her.'

Garvie sighed wearily.

She said softly, ‘If you need help, you've only got to ask.' Her lips parted slightly and she blew a little noose of smoke towards him. ‘You know what I mean.'

Smudge called over, ‘You're wasting your breath, girl. He's got some sort of disease means he can't talk no more. He's not said nothing for, like, three days. We can still talk over here, though, Felix and me. Though Felix is a bit boring, to be honest.'

She gave him the finger and lowered her voice further. ‘Come on, Garv. I'll make you forget her.'

He glanced at her; for a moment it seemed he was finally going to speak, but instead he sighed again and lowered his head into his hands with a groan.

‘I keep trying to tell you, Garv. All you got to do to win is play. Know what I mean? We could be so good together, you and me.'

Garvie didn't move or lift his head out of his hands, and she pouted and struggled to her feet.

‘But I'm not going to wait for ever,' she said.

Smudge looked interested.

‘Now we're talking, Jess!'

‘Leave it out, pie boy.'

She put her sandals back on and turned away, and without lifting his head Garvie said into his hands, ‘What did you say?'

Jess hesitated. ‘I said, “Leave it out, pie boy.” But I was only talking to Smudge. I wasn't—'

‘Before that.'

She glanced uneasily at Smudge and Felix, who sat looking at her with interested expressions. ‘I said that about not waiting. You know, for ever.'

Garvie looked up. ‘You said, “All you got to do to win is play.”'

‘Yeah. Well.' She fiddled with her ear, embarrassed. ‘Clear enough, innit? No need to broadcast it.'

She would have said more, but she was silenced by the sight of Garvie leaping to his feet with his phone already clamped to his ear, and she watched him, astonished, as he began to pace up and down on the sunlit turf.

He paused briefly and looked at them all. ‘I am a moron,' he said in a slow, deliberate voice. ‘A
moron
.'

Now even Smudge looked embarrassed. ‘No worries, mate. We can't all have brains.'

Garvie stopped pacing and spoke urgently into his phone. ‘Alex, mate. Don't think, just react.
All you got to do to win is play
.'

Hard-eyed, tense-faced, he stood listening.

‘You sure? Definite? Safe. Doesn't matter what it means. Yeah. It is. Very important. Catch you later, man.'

As if Jess wasn't surprised enough already, Garvie took her in his arms and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Jessica Walker,' he said. ‘You're a bit of a star.'

Smudge said, ‘Here, Sherlock, do you want to tell us what this shit storm's all about?'

Garvie looked back from the top of the slope. ‘Don't you remember, Smudge? You asked what gambling's got to do with anything.'

‘Yeah. So?'

‘Chloe could have told you.'

‘Told me what?'

‘Play to win. Give it a shot. Take a chance. Stake it all. Lose your shirt. Don't you think that sounds a bit like Chloe?'

‘Yeah, but ... Yeah. But ...' He stood silent.

‘Friday afternoon she was at Alex's and they had this blow-up row. She said something to him he thought was odd but he couldn't remember what it was. Well, he just remembered.
All you got to do to win is play
. Muttered it to herself. Bitter. It happens to be the Imperium slogan.'

Momentarily forgetting Jessica's presence, Smudge scratched, deep and hard. ‘I still don't get it, though,' he said at last. ‘I mean, what was her game?'

‘Good question. That's what I'm going to have to find out.'

Then he was gone.

THERE WAS ANOTHER
way of looking at it: all you got to do to
lose
is play. But Chloe would have scorned thinking like that. She was the brass girl, tough and durable. She didn't do slow and safe: she wasn't made that way. She took risks, seized the day. But why did he think suddenly of Chloe's mother, puffy-faced and lost-eyed in her dressing gown? Why did he remember the photographs of Chloe as a child along the mantelpiece in her room, the teddy bears on her bed? He wiped a hand across his face and sighed. Then he went over the Imperium car park wall in the usual way and made his way through the cars and shadows.

The first thing he saw was a black Porsche sitting by the casino's back entrance. Strolling over to it, he walked around it once. It was short and low-slung, so black it was almost blue. He peered in through the windows, gave a low whistle and strolled away again into the shadows on the far side of the car park, where he lit up and smoked for a while, telling himself he was trying to decide what to do next, though he already knew, as he always seemed to.

Inside, he resumed his stroll with a complimentary glass of champagne, seeing no one he knew – partly a bad thing, partly a very good thing – and thinking about Chloe. Why had she come here? To win, obviously.

But – as Smudge had asked – what game was she playing?

Keeping an eye out for the manager, he strolled methodically through the baccarat and poker rooms, past the roulette and blackjack tables, past the slot machines and one-armed bandits, across the coffee lounge and bar. And as soon as he had refreshed his sense of the layout of the place, he strolled through a door marked
STAFF ONLY
and disappeared from view.

On the other side of the door it was suddenly quiet. There was no Roman theme. It was plain and functional. Garvie looked both ways down the corridor and turned left. Soon he came to the foot of a staircase carpeted in black shag-pile with a gold chain hung across the entrance, and he looked up the stairwell for a moment, then continued along the bare corridor. From time to time he passed a door on the right-hand side, always locked. He turned left and left again, noting how the corridor turned to follow the perimeter of the public rooms of the casino. Soon, he calculated, he'd reach the restaurant and cocktail bar. A minute later he heard voices ahead and, turning left again, found himself in a small lounge area filled with sofas and low tables half obscured by over-large potted plants of an exotic nature. It was deserted. But on the opposite side were three doors, one of them open, and through it came the sound of an angry voice.

‘What the hell's wrong with you?'

A male voice. A voice harsh with cheap authority. And something else, Garvie thought. Anxiety. Or fear.

That was interesting.

Garvie sat down on one of the sofas and lit up. Half hidden under the broad leaves of what looked like a palm tree, he sat back to listen.

‘I got no time for this,' the voice said. ‘What are we running here, a charity?'

‘No, sir. It's just this headache—'

‘You think I give a shit about your headache? You think the punters out there want to know about your headache?'

‘No, but—'

‘You got a face on like Grumpy the dwarf. All right, you're short. But you can smile, can't you?'

‘Yes, sir.'

A girl in a toga came through the door, wiping her face. She was short. Also unsmiling. She went between the sofas without seeing Garvie, and out of a door on the other side. As it opened there was the brief hum of voices and the clank of slot machines, then quiet again as it closed.

The voice in the room said, ‘What's her name, anyway?'

Another deeper, slower voice, said, ‘Messalina.'

‘I mean, what's her real name?'

‘Madonna.'

There was a short pause suggesting astonishment.

‘You're shitting me. Madonna? Listen, my old man sees so-called Madonna pulling that long face out there, he's going to first of all rip her head off, which I don't care about, and second of all rip
my
head off. Which bothers me. If he looks like he's getting the hump, I want to know. All right?'

There was a pause. Then the same voice said, ‘Christ, I hate it when he's here on a Friday.'

There was another pause.

‘Listen.'

Now his voice was cautious.

‘He had another visit this morning. Some rag-head DI.'

‘What's he after?'

‘Nothing. I don't know. What are they ever after? What I want to know is: we run a pretty tight ship, don't we?'

‘Yeah.'

‘No splitters.'

‘No splitters.'

‘What about the tarts? That's my only worry. See? What about this Madonna? What about that new one? Hannah, isn't it?'

‘Yeah. Hannah.'

‘Thinks she's such an independent spirit. What about her? She going to shoot her mouth off?'

There was another, longer pause, as if dedicated to hard thinking.

‘See what I mean?'

‘Yeah.'

‘I just want to make sure no one's saying the wrong things.'

‘Don't worry about it. I'll have a word.'

‘All right. Good.'

A moment later two men came out of the room. The first was big and bald, dressed like the doormen in over-tight dinner jacket and black bow tie. He went across the lounge with massive shunting movements and exited into the casino. The other man was the manager. Garvie noticed again how young he was. Twenty, twenty-one. He had a raw, moist face and a twitchy expression. And pig-crazy eyes. He followed the big man, stopped suddenly, sniffed, looked all around without seeing anything, swore, and went on into the casino too.