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Dedication

For Stef

1

It happens so quickly. You’ve got no idea.

Imagine you’re standing somewhere. A bus stop, a quiet road, the park. Somewhere familiar. Then the whole world tilts. There’s a massive rush, like the first breathless lunge down a roller-coaster. You’re carried forward, careering over yourself, unstoppable, so fast you can hardly think.

A second and it’s done. You’re back where you started, and everything’s the same.

Only everything’s different.

It happens so quickly.

Tuesday evening. I’ve taken a short stretch of road that runs beneath an old railway line just out of town. The high walls are damp, the Victorian brickwork almost black, forming a kind of semi-enclosed underpass.

There’s no more than forty or fifty yards of it, including a sharp bend, right beneath where the trains used to go. Not many people come this way. It’s obsolete, little more than a nuisance for town planners.

I like it. For the time it takes to go from one end to the other, the world feels empty, a silent snapshot of times gone by, not a soul to break the stillness.

But tonight there’s a car. Maroon, a bit tatty. It’s parked up on the kerb, just after the bend. I move out and walk in the middle of the road, give it a wide berth. There’s a guy at the wheel. He’s alone and he’s watching me in his mirror. He has a baseball cap pulled down, but I can see his eyes.

He lowers his head as I approach. It looks as if he might be in some sort of trouble. I slow down as I get level with him.

Then he turns his head and looks at me.

Now I know why he’s there.

I’m not scared. When you’ve dealt with enough people like this you stop being afraid. But I’m curious. I want to know what he’s going to do now. So I stay where I am, in the middle of the road.

He lets the electric window down, looking straight at me as it opens.

‘Are you OK?’ I ask, good citizen voice.

He nods very slightly. Nasty eyes. They all have the same eyes. Doesn’t matter how old they are. And this one’s not old. Mid-twenties, scrawny body, bony face.

‘Good!’ I say, upbeat, friendly.

I want him to know I’m not scared.

His eyes are small and ugly, animal eyes.

‘You need somethin’?’ he asks.

I shake my head.

He exhales, looks away, and even his boredom seems evil. It annoys me, that casual gesture. But it’s also meant to be threatening. I get ready to go. I’ve had enough.

‘Right, great!’ I say. ‘I’ll be off!’

Screw him. I’ll get a photo of his number plate when I’m at the top of the road, up by the entrance to Tesco’s car park. The police can have him.

‘Yeah, go fuck yourself,’ he says, a spasm of irritation running through his angular body.

I freeze.

‘I… I’m sorry?’

I feel myself moving towards the car.

‘Go on. Leg it, yer nosy twat.’

The world lurches violently. My body floods with something ice-cold and utterly terrifying. I feel myself being carried at unimaginable speed to a place I’ve never been. It only takes a second.

‘I was worried,’ I explain, moving closer.

My hand reaches out, fingertips touching the roof of the car.

This can’t be right, but it feels right. I don’t know why. Everything’s changed. That’s all I know.

‘Worried,’ I repeat.

My other hand slips inside my jacket. I lean in until my body touches the driver’s door. What am I searching for? What am I doing?

Then I find it. Between my fingers. A pencil. I can feel its smooth hexagonal shaft, its strange steely rigidity. This can’t be right. But it must be. My world twists irrevocably on its axis. My roller-coaster moment.

‘I… just…’ I say, leaning further in to him.

But he’s not listening. He’s not even looking at me. He’s looking straight ahead, like I’m not there.

The point enters just above his eyeball, taking part of the upper eyelid with it. Easily, easily it goes in. Shockingly so. And shockingly fast, although in fact I’m calm, not shocked at all.

His face hardly changes. There’s the slightest expression of surprise. But mild surprise, no more than that. It might be that he remains exactly as he is, and the lack of horror is somehow expressive; peaceful, like he knows that this is what needs to be done, that I have no choice.

The pencil slides right in.

There must have been some force. But I can’t recall.

When I let go only a couple of inches are sticking out. With the ball of my hand I push it in all the way.

Then I wait, resting against the car.

When his body starts to sag I know it’s over.

That’s how it happens.

So quickly.

You’ve got no idea just how quickly it can all change.

Everything.

Thursday

2

Joe Romano reached for his mug and took a gulp. The coffee was stone-cold. He put it down on his desk amid a pile of case files. Break-ins mainly. There was another case open on his screen. Just admin for the insurance adjusters at this stage. Fiddly paperwork. Everything’s got to be right. This last one must have taken him, what, an hour?

He clicked ‘save’, logged out of the system and looked across the open-plan operations room. The shift was winding down. People rose from their seats, attending to aching lumbar regions, exchanging friendly words with night-shift officers and support staff, who’d just begun to trickle in.

‘Joe! Fancy a drink?’

A young man in a trim grey suit grinned. The question was ironic. Nothing new there. A few people looked over at Joe with a mixture of amusement and pity.

‘Or a bit of unpaid overtime? More your style, eh, Joe?’

Detective Constable Gwyn Merchant was one rank lower, and a decade younger. But you’d never have known. Cocksure with a wardrobe to match. The kind of guy who rarely got creases in the trousers of his Paul Smith suits.

He came across and handed Joe a slip of paper.

‘Misper. Only been gone a couple of days.’

‘Adult?’

‘Friggin’ scag,’ Merchant said, laughing, already walking away, thinking about his first pint. ‘His mammy rang it in. Worried sick. Bet she’s the only one.’

‘This is everything?’ Joe asked, looking at the paper in his hand.

Merchant stopped, turned, as if the question was slightly impertinent.

‘Mum wasn’t making much sense when she called, apparently. I was his last arresting officer. So they sent it through to me.’

‘Right. I’ll look into it.’

‘Piece o’ shit. He’ll be off his tits in a gutter,’ Merchant said as he went back to his desk. ‘Or dead in a gutter. Either way, log it ’n’ leave it, unless you’ve nowt better on.’

He patted his pockets, making sure he’d left nothing on his desk, and followed his mates towards the door. They all looked like they were gagging for a drink, for a laugh. CID officers? More like teenagers.

On the slip of paper there was a phone number and a name: Craig Shaw. One of Merchant’s arrests? Joe didn’t recognize the name. No surprise there. After a year coordinating missing persons and break-ins, Joe’s knowledge of serious crime in Leeds was about as peripheral as it got.

He logged back into the system for a quick look. It wasn’t as if anybody was going to be working at his desk tonight. It was an age since he’d handed over a live case to the night shift. At least this was a known individual. He could have a quick look for nothing.

Craig Shaw’s file summary flicked up on the screen. A dozen entries, mainly arrests and cautions, but also a couple of convictions. Drugs. Such small-time stuff that the very lack of ambition was depressing. Selling blow on a couple of university campuses, amphetamines in a nightclub. One gram of coke. One bloody gram. He got eighteen months for that, suspended. A while later, the same thing. Two years this time. Out in less than one.

Mugshot: face so thin he looked malnourished. An arrogant stare, something self-assured about the way he held his head up. And he was an ugly runt. Ugly and unpleasant. Merchant was probably right: who was going to be bothered that he’d gone missing?

He drummed his fingers on the desk. Mrs Shaw rings the police a couple of days after her drug-dealing son disappears. The twenty-five-year-old son who presumably still lives at home. Now his mum’s worried sick. The whole thing was like a Johnny Cash song.

Reining in his prejudice, he reminded himself of the official definition of a missing person: Anyone whose whereabouts is unknown, whatever the circumstances… obligation to protect the rights of citizens without discriminating on any grounds. He scrolled up the file, saw the address.

‘Really?’

What else was he going to do of a Thursday night?

3

The Brick. Unusual name for a pub. He took his pint and went to stand outside the front doors. The light in the sky was fading fast, and there was an annoying February wind. In Leeds there’s always an annoying wind, unless there isn’t, then you wish there was. Either way, the weather’s always just a little bit shit. On the door was a poster, handwritten in thick black marker pen on bright orange paper: a DJ on Friday, a band on Saturday. What might have been, eh, Joe?

Across the road from the pub was a strip of grass that sloped upwards, long and irregular, too steep to be of any use. Beyond it were half a dozen rows of back-to-back houses running all the way up the hillside, their chimney stacks jet-black against the evening sky. They were larger than average for the area. Good solid stuff. Turn of the century. The previous century.

He sank a third of his pint. IPA? Bitter? He couldn’t remember what he’d ordered. It had the reassuring aroma of dusty rags and sweet mould. Real ale, the taste of his youth. Young lads today? Hardly any of ’em drank this stuff. He studied the pint glass in his hand. A young lad? Forty-eight hours he’d been gone. Could you even class that as missing? It was a decent bender, was all. Mum didn’t think so, though.

He looked again at the houses. The one at the end had two little attics, a narrow, angled staircase leading up to them. Each room had a fireplace, an original ceramic surround with floral patterns in relief on the tiles, an unexpected touch of elegance. For his entire childhood, a small vase of plastic flowers had sat in each fireplace. Other than that, the rooms had stood bare and unused. They could never persuade their grandma to do anything with the attics. When she died, they sold the house to a mobile hairdresser. Did he still live there? Had he done anything with the top floor?

DS Joe Romano spent the next couple of minutes wondering whether he could use his warrant card to talk his way into the house and have a quick look at the attics. While he was there, he might just pop down into the cellar and see if he could find his grandma’s old mangle.

He finished his pint and considered another. It was only as he was walking back to the bar that he remembered why he was here. Mrs Shaw had lost her son and didn’t know where to find him.

4

The terraced houses down behind the Brick were a little less impressive than the ones over the way, where his grandparents had lived. Same vintage but not quite as large. Attics with staircases? Lofts more likely. Trapdoor in the ceiling. There were about a dozen streets, hypnotic in their sameness, something majestic in the repetition, age-darkened red brick houses lined up to order, one after the other, street after street, the columns of a Victorian terracotta army, imperious in its discipline.

But as he walked up Claremont Road he noticed that the lintels of many houses had been painted in red or black gloss, and several houses had their entire façades done in sickly, brick-like colours. This wasn’t how he remembered the area. What had once been a latticework of neat, identical houses had mutated into something less uniform, dowdier, more random; wheelie bins outside, crappy double glazing, old satellite dishes that nobody’d bothered to take down. The odd nicely maintained one – white sash windows, a decent wooden door, the immediately recognizable patina of ordered living – looked out of place amid the general malaise, like a bloke wearing Harris tweed to go dogging.

Wortley, West Leeds: the Romano family had been based here since the early 1900s. The area had seen better days. Then again, he thought as he made his way along the street, wishing he’d had that second pint, you could say the same about the Romanos.

As he stood there and knocked he felt the eyes of several people on him. Young, heavy-set adults who seemed to be there for no reason, nothing better to do, their front doors open, and them neither in nor out, just hanging around. He noted the gaudy colours of their casual, loose-fitting clothes, and it occurred to him that he, sporting a mid-grey Burton’s two-piece and a tie, was the one who looked out of place.

‘Mrs Shaw?’

‘Police?’ she said, standing well back from the door, which was open less than a foot.

‘Detective Sergeant Romano, Leeds CID. I’m here about Craig.’

‘You found him?’

‘I’ve only had his name an hour. Can I come in?’

The door opened wider, with her squarely behind it. Joe went inside, and the door closed again quickly.

She stank of smoke. The house did, but it came from her. A stale smell, one he knew well enough. Ex-smokers never forget. But here in the narrow entrance of the hall it was bitter and overpowering.

She was average height, and about fifty, he reckoned, but thin and drawn. You could have added another ten years to that and no one would have argued.

‘I’ve got some questions about your son.’

She lifted a hand. It seemed to shake. Even her arm was unsteady.

‘Front room?’ he asked.

She nodded, lowering her arm and searching for the wall behind her, palm flat against it. She was pissed. That explained the front door. She hadn’t wanted to open it too much because she was off her face.

He stepped into the front room and almost gagged. The stink of cigarettes was overlaid with an acrid stench of food, sweat and farts. He glanced at the windows, wondered how long it was since they’d been opened.

‘I don’t have anything to tell you, as of yet,’ he said, taking a seat on a large white leather sofa, one of two that took up most of the room, along with a huge TV in the corner, which was switched on, the volume turned down.

She made her way to the other sofa and eased herself down onto it, turning the TV off with a remote.

‘So, how long’s he been gone? Tuesday, is that right?’

‘Aye. Tuesday.’

‘You’ve rung around the hospitals?’

She nodded, then reached down to the floor for a can and took a drink. He didn’t recognize the brand.

‘Want one?’

He smiled. ‘Depends what it is.’

She took another gulp, almost grimacing.

‘Cider. Cheap stuff. I got a lager in the fridge.’

‘I’m all right, thanks.’

She manoeuvred the can back down to the floor with the deliberateness of someone trying to stay on the right side of comatose.

‘Sure?’ she said, gesturing towards the floor. ‘This stuff’s cheap as shit.’

You can’t argue with that, he thought, scanning the place for evidence of the missing son, and finding none. No photos, no games console, no men’s magazines, in fact nothing to read at all. There were the two sofas, the TV, and a boarded-up hearth with a gas fire, shelves on either side stacked with DVDs. There were a few odds and ends, a pile of opened envelopes, a decorative mug from somewhere he couldn’t make out, a huge red glass ashtray that looked like it’d been stolen from a pub several decades ago.

‘This your house, is it?’

‘Yeah, right! I rent it from Mr Azrim. He’s all right. Been here a while.’

‘How long’s a while?’

‘Four, five year.’

‘Do you work, Jane? Can I call you Jane?’

‘You can call me what you want, love. And no. I mean, yes and no.’

Joe sighed.

‘I’m not here about your benefit claims. Could I have a straight answer?’

‘I’m on the social. I do a bit of cleaning. Cash in hand. Haven’t done it for a while. It’s not regular.’

He nodded, considered Ms Shaw’s lot. Housing benefit for the rent. The cleaning money for cheap cider. Over the last twelve months he’d thought about doing something similar himself. Downsizing.

‘Craig’s dad? Is he worried?’

She looked for her cigarettes, then took an age getting one to her lips and lighting it.

‘Never been a dad,’ she said, staring at the tip of her cigarette as it smouldered in her hand.

‘No one at all? Anyone Craig might have gone to, or contacted?’

She shook her head.

‘Doesn’t know who his dad is. Was.’

‘Dead?’

She raised her head, keeping it as steady as she could.

‘Dunno. I never knew.’

‘And there’s no one else he might have gone to stay with? Family? Friends? Have there been any arguments recently, with you or anyone else?’

She shook her head.

He sat back, took a few breaths. The stink was getting bearable, and the sofa was pretty comfortable. Leather’s definitely the way to go. Pricey, though. You can’t afford it the moment, Joe…

‘Have you lived in Wortley long?’

She took a long draw on her cigarette. He watched as she sucked the smoke in. There was something unnatural about it. Her shoulders actually lifted to expand her lungs, as if to get more smoke into them.

‘Leeds. Here and there.’

He didn’t press the point. He sensed that Jane Shaw would be on file back at Elland Road.

‘I’m from round here as well,’ he said. ‘My grandma lived across from the Brick ’til the day she died. And my Uncle Frank started out as a clerk at Leeds Fireclay, just after the war.’

He thought about his uncle for a second. Francesco Romano. Dead now. Didn’t stay a clerk for long. The Romanos? We’re not clerks.

When he looked up, she was lost.

‘Fireclay?’

‘They made ceramics,’ he said. ‘Bricks, pots, plates, that kind of thing.’

This wasn’t getting him very far.

‘OK. So, these cases normally resolve themselves. Does he drive? Has he got a vehicle at the moment?’

‘He’s got mine. He borrows it.’

‘Model, registration?’

She coughed. A big loop of phlegm crackled in her throat. She swallowed it back down.

‘Toyota something. It’s purple.’

‘Number plate?’

She came close to a smile, then looked for an ashtray. There was a saucer at her feet halfway under the sofa. She pulled it out and used that.

‘Never mind. I’ll find it,’ he said. ‘The car’s registered in your name, at this address?’

‘Aye.’

‘And he uses it to do what? Does he have a job?’

That semi-smile again.

‘You know what he does.’

‘Full-time, is it? He sells drugs, nothing else?’

‘Needs a car.’

He was losing patience.

‘So, Jane Shaw, here’s the thing. Your son’s a grown man. And he’s only been gone two days. Tell me, why am I here on a Thursday evening, when I should be at home tucking into a Sainsbury’s cottage pie for one and cracking open a nice bottle of Côtes du Rhône?’

She took the can and drank what remained of the cider.

‘’Cos he hasn’t paid his rent.’

‘That’s why you rang the police?’

Her head was unsteady, but she was working to keep it stable. She was drunk, but there was a jumpiness to her, hidden somewhere beneath the languid movement of her body.

‘He’s not here, is he? I got the right.’

‘And does he supply you with anything? To pay his rent?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘So you’re drinking cheap cider as a substitute? What are we talking about? What do you use?’

‘Use? Owt. Owt I can get.’

He shifted forward in his seat, considering a charge of wasting police time. But her son had been officially reported as missing. Call it a catch twenty-two. Call it bullshit. He had no choice.

‘When did he last answer his phone?’

‘Tuesday.’

She recited his number from memory with some difficulty. Joe dialled it into his own phone and called. Unavailable.

‘Got any recent photos?’

She twisted on the sofa, pulled a phone from her pocket. Juggling her cigarette and the phone, she made an attempt to find the photos.

‘Here,’ she said, finally passing it across to him.

Android, like he used to have. Easier to find stuff than on his bloody iPhone. He opened the image gallery and flicked through the most recent ones. There he was, Craig Shaw, ugly and unimpressive, a selfie with his mum in Nando’s. There were a few other shots taken in similar surroundings, Craig eating a burger, Craig drinking a beer, Craig pulling a stupid face and pointing at it with both index fingers, as if otherwise you might miss it.

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