Missing, Believed Crazy Page 14

  ‘Eve, babe,’ said Eddison, ‘this is highly confidential. But there’s talk of your being given a special nomination at the Share Awards on Sunday night.’

  ‘The Share Awards?’ I could hardly believe my ears.

  Eddison nodded, smiling. ‘Live on terrestrial TV. Syndicated throughout the world. Highlights repeated throughout the week.’

  For a celebrity like me, the Share Awards are the ultimate. They are the annual occasion when world-class models, actors and TV personalities gather to celebrate what is important in life – love, bravery, the family, kids. They mix with ordinary people and give prizes to the Teacher of the Year, the Foster Parent of the Year, the Differently Abled Child of the Year and so on.

  ‘To recognize your bravery.’ There was a smile on Eddison’s face. ‘At the moment, they’re calling it the Share Celebrity Mother of the Year.’

  I was moved – of course I was. Who wouldn’t want to be voted the Share Celebrity Mother of the Year, live on TV before an international audience?

  ‘But, Eddison, the T-shirt,’ I said. ‘That will change everything. People don’t like to be frightened or depressed at the Share Awards. They’re all about feeling good, about hope.’

  Eddison, in his quiet, calm voice, put me right again.

  ‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘The T-shirt clinches it. When the news breaks, there’s no way that the Share Awards will drop their plans for the Celebrity Mother of the Year award. Babe, you’re a shoo-in.’

  WIKI

  ‘Something’s happened,’ Jade said as we let ourselves back into the flat. I swear I was beginning to dread those words. It seemed that whenever Mark and I turned our backs, something would happen.

  They told us about the T-shirt.

  ‘It must have been the psycho,’ said Mark.

  ‘Why would he want to steal Trix’s T-shirt?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jade muttered. ‘What kind of fashion victim would want that?’

  Trix ignored her. ‘We’ve got to tell my parents not to worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll send Mum a text tonight.’

  ‘They’ll trace it,’ said Mark.

  ‘We’ve got to do something,’ I said. ‘Somehow we’ve got to get word to Trix’s mum.’

  MARK

  We were still discussing how to send a text without revealing where we were when there was the sound of a key fumbling at the lock of the flat. It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon. The Hart brothers were back from their night out.

  ‘Trix!’ said Wiki. ‘Get your dark glasses on. You’re Tim, remember.’

  Muttering rebelliously, Trix walked off.

  Seconds later, the front door opened and two guys, one of whom was Brad, staggered in.

  ‘Hi, boys.’ Jade spoke casually, then turned to Wik and me. ‘These are my brothers,’ she said. ‘Brad, you know. George, you don’t.’

  The two guys stood there, swaying slightly, looking confused. They were what my dad calls ‘feeling no pain’.

  ‘Brats,’ George drawled. ‘In the apartment. What’s going on?’

  ‘I told you, man,’ said Brad. ‘That was where I went last night. I had to drive around half of England to pick up Jade and her boyfriends. They’ll be hanging out with us for a few days.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, whatevs.’ George sounded unimpressed by the idea.

  I looked at Jade, expecting one of her snappy comebacks. She sipped her juice, saying nothing.

  ‘Where’s Tim?’ asked Brad.

  ‘Here.’ Trix appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, her Ray-Bans in place.

  ‘Hey, guy.’ Brad gave her a broad, drunken grin. ‘How’s it hangin’?’

  Trix hesitated for a moment. ‘Pretty well, thank you,’ she said coldly.

  ‘I’m wrecked.’ George lurched towards one of the bedrooms. ‘Laters, guys.’

  WIKI

  We stood there, feeling slightly embarrassed.

  ‘Welcome to the Hart family home,’ said Jade.

  She seemed to be about to say something when Brad reappeared, now without his trousers.

  ‘Hey, sis,’ he said to Jade. ‘How about cooking us up something special tonight, huh? Just like the old days.’

  He looked at me. ‘She’s an ace cook, man. I love it when she comes to stay.’

  ‘There’s nothing in the fridge.’ Jade spoke quietly. I sensed that she wasn’t thrilled by the way her brothers treated her like an unpaid servant.

  ‘Just tell her what you like to eat, guys,’ said George. ‘Jade cooks most anything.’

  I noticed that Trix was looking pale, a sure sign that she was about to blow her top.

  ‘I’ve heard that guys can cook too,’ she said, smiling dangerously.

  ‘That’s interesting, Tim,’ I said, thinking quickly. ‘What do you cook?’

  She blinked quickly, remembering just in time that she was meant to be a boy.

  ‘Risotto,’ she said. ‘Tell you what – that’s what we’ll have tonight.’

  ‘A dude cooking risotto.’ Brad shook his head as he headed back to the bedroom. ‘I’ve heard everything now.’

  PETE BELL

  In another lifetime, when I was a successful reporter, I used to be asked the secret of successful investigations.

  The answer was simple. You ask questions. You work round the clock. You keep pushing against the door. Eventually someone will say something that gives you a clue. You ask more questions. You push harder. There’s a chink of light. Eventually, if you’re lucky, the door begins to open.

  That day, that dark day, when the slashed T-shirt turned up, I began to see things more clearly.

  The cop Cartwright was useless. My ex-wife and her creep of a publicist Eddison Vogel were playing some kind of weird game of their own. In the fog of egos, the one person who mattered in all this, Trix, was getting lost.

  I hit the phones. I called all the journalists I knew who were covering the case. I asked questions.

  They were, of course, pleased to hear from old Pete Bell. Maybe I could give them an interview. They had written about the mother of Little Trixie. Talking to the daddy would give them a new angle.

  One after the other, I told them that I was talking to nobody. Right now, I wasn’t interested in helping them. They needed to help me.

  And suddenly all my old pals were not quite so friendly. The case was hotting up. They were under pressure from their editors. They knew stuff, sure, but right now they were only rumours. It would be wrong to pass them on to me.

  ‘You know how it is, Pete,’ one of them said. ‘You’ve been there yourself. You want to be the person to break the story.’

  ‘You see,’ I said, ‘to me it’s not a story. It’s my daughter. It’s a matter of life and death.’

  ‘Give me an exclusive interview and we can talk, Pete.’

  I hung up. There was one golden rule I had forgotten. Journalists don’t help journalists.

  Late that night, I took out my old contacts book and leafed through its pages. As if I were being guided in some way, I found myself staring at a name I had all but forgotten.

  Detective Inspector Trevor Jones. Retired. Also known as ‘the Grey Fox’.

  Jones knew more about crime than most policemen had forgotten. He had caught criminals. He had become friends with criminals. Then he had become a criminal.

  There was only one problem. He hated my guts.

  EX-DETECTIVE INSPECTOR TREVOR JONES

  No comment.

  EVA JOHANSSON

  The police had a plan. That was what Barry Cartwright told me and I had no alternative but to believe him. They wanted twenty-four hours while the discovery of Trixie’s T-shirt remained secret. The next day, the news would be released and I would appear at a press conference.

  It was a strange day, waiting for the next move. Eddison was with other clients. Jason was working. Even the Drunk seemed to be off on some mad project of his own.

  Eva Johansson was feeling very, very alone.

  PETE BELL


  There was no point in telephoning the Grey Fox. Ever since he had been released from prison, he had refused all requests for interviews. He was that very unusual thing – a famous person who is not a blabbermouth.

  When I was working, Jones had been one of the most senior policemen in the land – a quiet, grey-haired man who had a reputation for catching the bad guys.

  Until one day someone investigated rumours that he was taking holidays in Spain with bank robbers. Someone started investigating the investigator. The Grey Fox found himself hunted. Someone discovered that he had been taking bribes from the very people he was meant to be bringing to justice. There was a scandal, a court case. He was given a five-year jail sentence for corruption and perjury.

  The name of that someone who ended the career of Detective Inspector Trevor Jones? You’ve guessed it, of course.

  EX-DETECTIVE INSPECTOR TREVOR JONES

  I will tell you this and nothing else. If there was anyone in the world I would happily never have seen again, it was Pete Bell.

  I live a quiet life. I’m retired. I’ve made mistakes in the past. We all have. I’ve moved on.

  But then there he was, the piece of scum who destroyed my life. Older, uglier, sadder, but there was no mistaking him. He stood there on my doorstep.

  And would you believe it? Pete Bell was actually asking me a favour.

  PETE BELL

  The Grey Fox was an old man but, when I rang the front doorbell of his little semi-detached house in South London, he recognized me at once.

  When I said I was looking for a favour, the expression on his face remained as blank as it always was.

  ‘No way,’ he growled.

  ‘Trevor,’ I said. ‘It’s about my daughter. She’s disappeared.’

  ‘I read about it. Very sad.’

  He tried to close the door on me. I put a foot forward and held it fast. It was quite like old times.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about the past,’ I said. ‘Listen. I’m desperate.’

  The old man looked at me sullenly.

  ‘I heard you are a drunk these days.’

  ‘We’ve both had tough times,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not writing about this, are you?’

  ‘I just want to find my daughter.’

  He stepped back. ‘Five minutes,’ he muttered.

  I stepped into the dark hall. There was still a smell of breakfast in the air, and I heard the sound of someone in the kitchen.

  ‘I’ll be in the front room,’ he called out.

  We went into a small room and sat in small identical armchairs on each side of a sad little gas fire.

  ‘You’ve read about the case, have you?’ I asked.

  The Grey Fox shook his head. ‘I gave up newspapers years ago. I know the kind of scum who write for them.’

  I let the insult pass.

  ‘I’ve seen stuff on the TV news,’ he muttered.

  ‘The person that’s holding her has just sent us her T-shirt. It seems to have been stabbed.’

  The old man raised his eyes. Nothing can surprise or shock an ex-copper.

  I pressed on. ‘Who would do that sort of thing?’ I asked.

  ‘An idiot,’ he said. ‘Someone who’s not thinking straight. He’s handing over evidence voluntarily.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  He shrugged, but behind his hooded eyes I sensed that the cunning old brain was cranking into action.

  ‘Your wife got enemies, has she?’ he asked casually.

  ‘Ex-wife. She left me,’ I said.

  ‘Not surprised,’ he said. ‘She was always well out of your class.’

  I waited. It paid to be patient with the Grey Fox.

  ‘He wants to hurt her. He wants to get to her. That’s what this is about. Some sort of revenge.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Listen, Bell.’ He stared at me and I was aware at that moment that his loathing for me was as powerful as it ever was. ‘I love kiddies like anyone but, to be honest, it doesn’t break my heart to see you in pain.’

  I looked away.

  ‘At least you know how it feels now.’ He stood up. ‘Now get out and leave me alone. I would say I’m sorry I couldn’t help you but then I’d be lying.’

  I followed him out of the room.

  He opened the front door.

  I gave it one last try. ‘If anything occurs to you –’ I reached into my back pocket for a tattered old card with my address and telephone number on – ‘could you just call me?’

  He looked at the card and laughed nastily. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he said, turning back into the house. ‘Now get out and leave me alone.’

  I put the card back in my pocket and left without another word.

  JADE

  My brothers: in a way, they were the perfect hosts. They were so wrapped up in their own little world that they hardly saw us.

  That evening, while we were busying around the kitchen and Trix was cooking her famous risotto, the phone rang. George took it in his bedroom. After a mumbled conversation, he stumbled out in a T-shirt and jockey shorts and thumped on Brad’s door.

  ‘Party over at Heidi’s,’ he said, then fell into the bathroom.

  Fifteen minutes later, it was, ‘Catch ya later, sis,’ as they headed out the door for the night.

  ‘What?’ Trix stood in front of a saucepan, a wooden spoon in her hand. ‘What about my risotto?’

  ‘That’s my brothers for you,’ I said.

  WIKI

  Over supper we talked about how to get word to Trix’s mother that, in spite of the slashed T-shirt, her daughter had not fallen into the hands of a mad knifeman.

  ‘We’ve got to text her,’ said Trix. ‘Sometimes she doesn’t look at her computer for days. She’s never far from her phone.’

  ‘They’ll trace it,’ I said. ‘They’ll know whose mobile it is and where they are. We’d be as good as handing ourselves in.’

  ‘Maybe I should just call her,’ said Trix. ‘I could speak really quickly, then hang up.’

  I shook my head. It was the same problem.

  ‘We’re kind of screwed,’ said Jade.

  I noticed a laptop lying amid some empty beer cans in the corner.

  ‘Maybe not,’ I said.

  JADE

  Frankly, the moment when Professor Nerdy Two-Brain Wiki Church started playing with the laptop, occasionally muttering to himself in some geeky code of his own, the rest of us began to zone out.

  He had told us that there might be a way to get a text message to Trix’s mom from Brad’s computer without anyone being able to know where it came from. There were websites which provided anonymous texts but, according to the professor, they could still be traced back. He muttered about protocols and embedded thingies and interrupted control systems. There was quite a lot of bouncing off this and that. An illegal server in Korea came into it somewhere.

  Give us a break, Wik. Just do it and spare us the explanations. After a while, we left him to it and watched a bit of TV.

  After about half an hour, he called out, ‘OK, give me the message you want to send. It’ll go through at eleven a.m. Korean time.’

  ‘I don’t want to rain on your parade, Wik,’ I said, ‘but I have bad news. We are not actually in Korea.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, tapping happily at his keyboard like a concert pianist. ‘That’ll be two a.m. our time. It’s completely untraceable.’

  Big admission now: I was almost impressed.

  WIKI

  Our problem was: how to convince Eva Johansson that she really was hearing from her daughter. For all she knew, it could be the Mad Knifeman trying to trick her. Or maybe even one of those sick practical jokes that some people like to play.

  I had the computer primed for (illegal) action. As the other three stood behind me, staring at the blank message screen, it became clear that our problems were not over.

  It was Jade who came up with the solution.

  ‘Her
e we go,’ she said. ‘You include something in the text that no one else in the world except you and your mom are supposed to know.’

  Trix closed her eyes for a moment. Then slowly, incredibly, she began to smile.

  JADE

  It was a short message, but a good one.

  ‘Mum Im OK. Ignre T-shirt. Be hme soon. Love you. Trix xxx. So you no its rlly me – Im telling u smthing only u & I no. Lst yr u hd csmtc surgery on yr bum!’

  EVA JOHANSSON

  Not my bottom! Anything but that. Please, Trix. No.

  It was the early hours of the morning when the cellphone beside my bed made the little chirruping noise that means a text has arrived.

  Who would be contacting me at that hour? It occurred to me that my agent Lori may have been texting from the coast with news about my major film project.

  To avoid waking Jason, I crept out to the bathroom, shut the door and turned on the light. I read the text.

  At first the words of the little screen made my heart leap. Trix was all right! My little Trixie was safe! Everything was going to be fine.

  But there was something wrong, something fishy about this. I sat on the edge of the bath and read the text again. Slowly, my joy – the simple joy of a mother – began to ebb away. I felt sick.

  There was no doubt about it. I was being blackmailed – blackmailed about something very intimate and secret to a woman. At the very moment my career as an actress was taking off again, a horrible, horrible story about my derrière would get into the papers. It would finish me. Not so long ago, I had been on the shortlist for the famous Rear of the Year Award. At that time, I told reporters that I had never had any surgery. If the truth about my bottom came out, I could kiss goodbye to any chance of being Share Celebrity Mother of the Year.