Running Girl (34 page)

She frowned. ‘Clark's her name. Anyway, she doesn't work at Imperium any more.'

‘Really? What happened?'

Her face closed down. ‘I don't know. Nothing. She just doesn't work there.'

Garvie nodded. ‘Well, Madonna. Lovely talking to you. Here's my stop. Save a smile for me at the blackjack table.'

He wondered if he might get a smile straight away, but Madonna was looking at him suspiciously again, and he turned and went down the bus towards the doors, and all the charm fell like a mask from his face and left him pale and staring.

THE CITY IS
a maze – the city at night is a trap.

Abdul kept glancing at him nervously in the rear-view mirror as they drove through the evening darkness to the Strawberry Hill estate.

‘Garvie man. You have trouble?'

Garvie shook his head. ‘Not me, Abdul. Someone else.'

‘This
personne
, he hiding good, eh? We looking here, we looking there.'

‘I don't know if she's hiding at all. I hope she is. We'll find out soon enough. When we get there.'

And he looked again out of the window across nearby rooftops to Strawberry Hill's tower block as Abdul changed gear and turned towards it.

It was ten o'clock, Wednesday, cool under an overcast sky now dark with fat rags of navy-blue cloud. Nearly twenty-four hours had gone by since he'd learned Hannah's name, a name he'd instantly recognized from a conversation overheard earlier.

What about that new one? Hannah, isn't it? Thinks she's such an independent spirit. She going to shoot her mouth off?

The words had been in his head all day. They made him feel sick but he couldn't seem to stop listening to them. Or stop thinking of a girl with chestnut-brown shoulder-length hair, grey eyes and a smile like a sudden splash of sunlight. All day at school he'd gone from class to class without speaking, and at home in the afternoon he'd sat staring unfocused at a revision book, apparently incapable of movement, until his mother left for her shift at the hospital, when he instantly jumped up, grabbed his jacket and ran to meet Abdul at the rank.

The city phone book had listed twenty-three Clarks with H as an initial. The calls he'd made earlier in the day had eliminated all but five. With Abdul as his driver he'd visited four of the addresses so far, none of them Hannahs; now there was only one left: Apt 138, Hornbeam Tower, Strawberry Hill.

Abdul pulled up at the side of the road and turned in his seat. ‘She live here?'

‘Maybe.'

Together they looked up at the tower.

Abdul said, ‘You want I wait?'

‘It's OK, man. I know you've got an airport job.'

Abdul made tsking noises and waved his hands.

‘No need to fret. I owe you several already.'

Abdul gave a half-smile. Half pleased, half fretful.

Garvie got out and Abdul leaned out of the window.

‘Be safe, Garvie man.'

For a moment Garvie stood watching the cab recede down the road, then he crossed to Hornbeam Tower. There was a wide pavement in front of an arcade of shops, mostly shut, and a plaque on the wall reading
HORNB A TOWER
. A group of kids sat on their bikes staring at him as he went past and through a heavy steel door into the entrance hall. He didn't know any of them. Inside, the hall was pale grey and empty, brightly lit by florescent tubes high in the ceiling above. Across the washed grey concrete floor was an empty office with a wooden door labelled STAFF ONLY and a window obscured by a grey blind. Opposite was a pair of metal lift doors.

He waited, and a man wearing army fatigues came in and waited with him.

The lift came, and they got in and stood together silently in the bright light, going up slowly. On the eighth floor the man got out, and Garvie went on alone to the twenty-third.

There was an alcove, and he stepped through it onto an exterior walkway and stood in a slight breeze gazing through the gap between metal railings and concrete ceiling at the evening sky curdling over the sewage plant and car works. Turning, he went along the walkway, past pairs of doors with glass fronts, some of which had been replaced with metal grilles, until he came to numbers 137 and 138.

The glass panel of number 138 had been smashed and someone had fixed a strip of cardboard over it.

He pressed the bell and heard it ring faintly inside the apartment, a sound as lonely as a telephone ringing after hours in an empty office. After a while he rang it again. A few minutes passed. He banged on the door frame with the side of his fist.

‘Hannah!' he shouted suddenly. ‘Hannah!'

A few inches to his left the door of number 137 opened a crack, and an elderly woman in a pink dressing gown peered out. She had a long loose face and grey hair in curlers, and she held the edges of her dressing gown together under her chin.

‘No point in banging,' she said. ‘She's gone.'

‘You mean Hannah?'

She looked at Garvie with tired, bitter eyes and sucked in her face. ‘Went off. Four or five hours ago. Who are you?'

‘A friend.'

‘That's what they all say, to start with.'

‘Do you know where she's gone?'

The old woman thought about this for a long time, chewing her loose lip. ‘I don't want any trouble,' she said in quiet disgust, and started to close the door.

Garvie jammed the toe of his shoe in it and she recoiled. The door flapped, and he had a brief glimpse of a small room with a loud carpet of chocolate and caramel swirls.

‘I don't want any trouble,' she cried again. ‘Whatever she's done.'

‘What do you mean, trouble?' He looked at her fiercely. ‘What do you mean, done?'

He jammed his foot further into the door, and the woman said in a nervous rush, ‘Anyway, she'd gone by the time they came for her.'

‘Came for her?' He felt sick.

‘That's right.'

‘Who?'

‘Three of them. And a dog. But she'd gone. Took herself off. And the baby.'

‘
Baby?
'

‘Scared something might happen to it, I should think.'

It was too much. He removed himself from her door, stepped away and sat down suddenly against the railings. Confused, the woman peered at him curiously for several long seconds.

‘Are you all right?'

‘No.'

Nodding sourly, she began to close the door again.

‘Wait,' Garvie said. ‘You have to help me. Where did she go?'

‘How would I know?'

‘Please. It's important.' Even as he said it, he saw it wasn't important to the woman. ‘She must have said something,' he added.

The woman shook her head. ‘If she's done something you should call the police.'

He leaped to his feet and she withdrew in alarm, shutting the door behind her with a snap, and though his momentum carried him across the walkway, he let his hand fall to his side. Banging on doors makes nothing happen. He looked at his watch. Ten thirty. Lighting a Benson and Hedges, he paced down the walkway to the corner of the building and stood at the railings looking out. The sky was the colour of wet ash. Almost half the city lay below him. Around the tower block, the low-rise apartments and maisonettes of the Strawberry Hill estate, haphazardly arranged in blocks and lines. To the east, the dense rows of Five Mile and the grey mass of Limekilns. Northwards was Tick Hill and City Central Hospital, pale against the dark hills beyond. In the south he could see the bright lights of clubs and casinos, and far away to the west, the blank skyscrapers of the business district, flat and blocky against the paler night sky. Everything was meshed together, like puzzle shapes of an enormous maze.

He smoked quietly, thinking. Somewhere in that maze a girl was running for her life. A girl with a baby.

Where would she run to?

As he smoked he remembered her. He saw her in his mind, the way she'd looked in Imperium in her short white toga. He saw the shape her mouth made when she spoke and he listened again to what she'd said, about getting out of the casino, about travelling, about India, with its sun and its colours and its—

He jerked out of his trance and stood there wide-eyed. Looking at his watch, he saw it was ten forty. Cursing, he flung his cigarette, still glowing, out into the night air, and, turning, ran as fast as he could back along the walkway.

THE BOYS ON
their bikes jeered as he ran past them. He crossed the road and ran down the opposite pavement in the direction of the bypass. He ran across a bridge over railway tracks, down a darkened street of maisonettes and flats, onto Cobham Road, the main drag of the Strawberry Hill estate, and ran on, hard, past offices and shops that were shut up for the night behind metal grilles. Panting heavily, holding his side, he took out his phone as he ran and dialled.

‘
Oui?
'

‘Abdul? Garvie.'

‘Garvie man, what is? You hurt?'

‘No. I'm fine. Where are you?'

‘Soon it will be airport. Five, six minute.'

He cursed.

‘Garvie man. What happen? It sound like you swim the sea.'

‘Nothing happen. I'm just jogging. But I need information.'

‘Information? What is?'

‘Is Tick Hill. Do you know it?'

‘
Mais oui
.' Abdul sounded pleased with himself. ‘I go Tick Hill many many time.'

‘That's good.'

‘But you have trouble. I hear it.'

‘No, man. That's just my lungs bleeding. Otherwise I'm absolutely fine.'

‘You want me come?'

‘No. Listen. I don't have long. I've just got a question about Tick Hill.'

‘For you, Garvie man, is
plaisir
. Ask it.'

Tick Hill was six or seven miles away, on the northern edge of the city. That was a long way at night when the buses were infrequent. After ten minutes of running the pain in Garvie's side had spread round his back to join another, different pain at the base of his spine. Without slowing down, he turned off Cobham Road into a street of small brick tenement houses and hobble-ran down the narrow pavement past wheelie bins and bikes, peering about him, until he found a bike chained up with a combination lock.

Standing there, panting, he gave silent thanks to Felix. There was no noise from any of the houses and, after listening for a moment, he bent to his task.

He set the four numbers of the combination lock to
zero
and gave the lock a short, sharp sideways tug. No give. He moved the first number to
one
, and tugged again, and kept going until he felt a slight gap open up momentarily between the keys. Then he moved on to the next number and began the process again.

In less than a minute the bike was free. It wasn't a great bike but it would do. On a strip torn off his cigarette packet he wrote:
Bit of an emergency. Back soon
, and wrapped it around the lock, which he left coiled on the doorstep. Inside the house a dog barked once, but by then he was already at the end of the street, cycling briskly into Cobham Road.

It was midnight by the time he reached Tick Hill. There was space here, and air. Dishevelled, sweating freely, he pedalled doggedly along wide quiet roads past semi-detached houses behind grass verges half reverting to their natural state. He could feel a breeze off the reservoir somewhere ahead of him in the darkness. If Abdul was right, there was a country road nearby and, at the end of that, a trailer park.

In his mind he saw Hannah in the Imperium and heard her talking to him: ‘Calls herself the Tick Hill Travel Bug ... When she writes her autobiography she's going to call it
From Trailer Park to Taj Mahal
.' Yes, the Tick Hill trailer park, a place where a travel bug might live, dreaming of the Taj Mahal. A friend's place, empty now. A place where a frightened girl with her baby might run to if she had nowhere else to go.

He looked at his watch and pedalled harder.

His phone rang.

Without slowing down he fished it out and looked at the caller's number. ‘Yeah?'

There was a pause at the other end. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Spot of exercise. Didn't you know I'm a fitness fanatic?'

Singh let this go. ‘I'm sorry to call so late. But there's been another development. A big one. You need to be aware of it.'

‘I'm listening.'

‘A sighting of the Porsche, up at Pike Pond.'

‘For the Friday night?'

‘Yes. One of the Froggett Wood residents returned from Botswana today. Turns out he's a jogger. He ran past Pike Pond at five on the Friday afternoon and saw the car parked there. He ran right past it.'

‘Close enough to get a look at the upholstery, then.'

‘It's very distinctive, as you said. There's no doubt it's Winder's car.'

‘Pig Crazy.'

Startled, Singh paused. ‘Well, I was only—'

‘Winder junior. I'm assuming he was in the car.'

‘Yes, that's right. Sitting waiting.'

‘For Chloe?'

‘Not that he's admitting.'

‘Have you arrested him?'

‘Yes. He's just now been released on bail. That's the reason I'm calling you. The Winders are really worked up now.'

‘Don't worry about me,' Garvie said. ‘I wouldn't dream of getting involved.' He pedalled out of a long well-lit street towards a narrow road marked
GOOSE LANE
, and clattered into the darkness of the countryside. As he went over a hidden pothole the bike's front light fell off into the road, and he cursed.

Singh said in a puzzled voice, ‘What are you doing, exactly?'

‘Just breathing. Go on. You're about to tell me what you think happened.'

Speaking slowly, Singh said, ‘I think you're right that Chloe went to the casino on Thursday night. And when she was there, something happened to upset her. I don't know what.'