Chapter 18

Isobel

I have to work fast; there’s only so long I can hope to have a story like this to myself. With knife crime all the rage in the national press at the moment, it’s just a matter of time before the bigger papers come sniffing around, wanting the number of a hard-won contact in return for a pitifully small finder’s fee and absolutely no acknowledgement in their subsequent piece that the legwork wasn’t theirs.

Hesitating for a moment, I reach below my desk and pull out a hardback black book, filled with names not kept in my Rolodex. The pages inside are floppy and worn, brimming with scraps of paper: names of old school friends and neighbours who’ve turned their hand to one line of work or another and proved useful contacts in the process, people who certainly wouldn’t be willing to stand up in a court of law.

There are so few leads to go on, but there is one person I can rely on to talk. Standing, I pull my coat over my shoulders and head for the door.

I am on the 253 bus moving east down Camden Road when Oscar calls back. It is the same bus route I would take to sixth form college back in the days before my parents upped sticks to a shiny new house in the South of France the year after I left school, leaving me to move in with my long-term boyfriend.

‘I’ve just been up to the Heath to have a look,’ Oscar says, and I don’t mention that I had just been thinking about him, that I am currently on the same bus we’d taken together so many times that I could almost feel him next to me, sharing a pair of earphones. Except now when I think of him, all I hear is the memory of my own screams.

Feeling my body lurch forward as the driver suddenly brakes at the junction with Holloway Road, I hold tightly to the handrail.

‘Really?’

‘There’s nothing there, Is.’

I pause, trying to slow the conversation down. ‘So you’ve been to the Heath already? I’d have come with you …’

My eyes flick to my phone screen: 10.57a.m. ‘I mean, Jesus, it’s not even eleven o’clock yet, you can’t have been there long. Did you know exactly where to look? Maybe you missed something. I—’

‘Issy, seriously, it’s OK – there’s nothing to worry about.’ Oscar clears his throat, trying to sound upbeat. ‘It looks like whatever you saw, it was nothing. Probably a couple of crackheads fighting over the last toot. You know what they’re like …’