Bad Sons (Booker & Cash Book 1) (2 page)

I tried the handle. It was locked. I put down my bag and fumbled around in the darkness to my left. A key to this outer door had always been kept under a plant pot. Sometimes someone known and trusted by my relatives would have something to drop off to them without a fuss. It was there.

I let myself in and held my breath when I tried the inner door. It should’ve been locked. It wasn’t. I found the light-switch and started up the stairs in the enclosed staircase, signalling my approach with shouts of hello and deliberately heavy footfall. Already the familiar smells of the shop and the flat were seeping through the walls to greet me.

At the top of the stairs, my hand on the doorknob, I hesitated. This door was never locked, but I didn’t want to go giving anyone a heart attack by bursting through it. I knocked and waited. I listened for sounds of movement, of life. Nothing. I banged harder and called out. Still nothing. Resigned to the inevitability of emptiness, I turned the knob and let myself in.

The smell of the books that cluttered the place combined with the familiar household and stale cooking smells were what I noticed third. First was the lack of light. Second was the lack of sound. At least it was warm. The heating was on.

Pointlessly, I stood there and called out a couple of times more. I was as sure as I could be there was no one home. I turned on some lights. It made me feel better. I wandered around the downstairs rooms. Everything looked like it always had. My anxieties began seeping away. I felt a little foolish. I’d been worried something had happened to them.

The answering machine was blinking – probably my messages. I let it blink. I sat down on the front of the sofa the better to think. I took out my mobile and rang my uncle’s number again. Across the room a tune started up and a screen glowed. I stopped that with my thumb. I rang my aunt’s mobile. Andy Williams crooned in another room. I got up and followed the noise. I found it in the kitchen on an untidy worktop. My concerns shuffled back in, heads down guiltily. I caught sight of a calendar on the opposite wall – a New Year gift from the local Chinese take-away. A date was heavily ringed in red pen. It was the date of my visit. The date of that day.

Leaning up against the worktop, I thought some more. When that didn’t help, I went through a glass-panelled door and explored the other four rooms on the first floor. Nothing. I took the stairs to the top floor and the thought occurred to me they could be in bed, unwell and asleep. I began calling out again, friendly, loud and clear. Nothing.

There was no sign of life or death in any of the six rooms on the top floor. I came down the stairs feeling anxious. I went into the kitchen and ran the cold water, took a glass from a cupboard and drank thirstily. I went back into the lounge and sat down. I stood up and went to the big picture window that looked out over the high street, the amusement park and the sea beyond. I looked both ways up and down the road.

A hundred yards off to my right and across the road light spilled out of the nearest pub to glisten on the wet pavement. No one sat at the all-weather picnic tables and I wasn’t the least bit surprised.

The Ocean was my uncle and aunt’s local. The desperate thought occurred to me that perhaps they’d gone across the road for a drink, just forgotten me. It was the only thing I could imagine and despite the scenario being unthinkable, it was what I hoped for.

I hadn’t taken off my jacket. I patted my pockets for wallet and phone, turned off the lights, went downstairs, locked up, returned the key to its hiding place and retraced my steps to the high street.

***

2

The inner, second door I pushed through to reach the bar slammed behind me, sucked hard-shut by the gusting sea breeze as the outer door was easing closed. The welcome warmth of the log fire drew a thin curtain of heat to push through. As I stood wiping my feet, I looked around the room for a face I might know. Once upon a time I knew a lot of people in here.

But it was a weekday night. There was no pool match and no darts match. That meant those who turned to see what the wind had blown in were the staff and those few regular lonely souls of the village who could afford to pay for their company. Good luck to them. It had to be better than sitting home alone gawping at the haunted fish tank.

A couple quickly turned their beer-bloated features and their drink-scarred eyes back to the television on the bar, one stared for a few seconds longer, a vague recognition fluttering about his features like a moth around a dim bulb, and one smiled a welcome. I had mixed feelings that I was not related to any of them.

Now I was in and recognised I went to the far end of the bar, unzipping my jacket as I moved. I leant on the counter and the smiling face came down the other side of it to speak with me.

‘Hello, stranger. Long time no see.’

‘Hello, Pam. How are you?’

‘Can’t complain. What can I get you?’

‘My aunt and uncle haven’t been in tonight, have they?’

She saw the worry on my brow and shook her head. ‘No. Last time I saw either of them was the weekend. They were in here on Sunday for lunch. What’s up?’

I explained. She frowned.

‘They knew you were coming. They mentioned it to me.’

I breathed out heavily. For something to say, I ordered a pint of ale. It would have been rude not to.

As she pulled on the pump, she said, ‘They could be up at the Legion.’

I hadn’t thought of that. It must have shown. She set my glass down on a beer towel. I reached for my wallet.

‘First one’s on me. You want me to phone and ask?’

I thanked her and said that would be great. I took a long pull on the tepid brown liquid. English ale was one of those little pleasures I sorely missed in a country where the government controlled the beer consumption to the point of virtually monopolising it with one brand of gassy chemicals masquerading as lager.

As she dialled, she said, ‘How long you back for?’

‘A week.’

She cut me off with a raised palm. I listened as she found out they weren’t there and hadn’t been in. I thanked her again for the drink and took a table for one near the fire. I didn’t feel like burdening or involving her further in my situation.

I stared into the flames and made my way to the bottom of the glass. I took my empty back to the bar, thanked Pam again and told her I’d see her soon. I had a stupid idea I’d step out on to the street and look up and across to see lights blazing in the windows above the bookshop. Nothing had changed.

I stopped in at the Indian restaurant, ordered a curry to go, waited ten minutes for it, scanned the local paper, walked back and let myself in. Nothing had changed.

I found a tray, some cutlery, went through to the front room and put the telly on. I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t want to be entertained. I finally admitted to myself I was worried.

I picked at the food, put it down, turned the telly off, stood up and moved around. I wanted to phone the police, but I didn’t know what I could tell them that wouldn’t sound panicky and stupid. There was no evidence of a crime having been committed.

I found myself back in the kitchen. I’d dumped a carrier bag of duty free cigarettes and whisky on the worktop. They were both for me; neither my aunt nor my uncle smoked or drank spirits.

I shrugged my jacket on, cracked the seal on the bottle, picked a glass off the draining board, poured a large one and went down the back stairs for an outside smoke and more worrying.

The wind was stronger and the air was colder. The night was darker and, round the back of the building, heavy with quiet. The duvet of cloud cover had closed over the moon, putting the Earth to bed – or at least the part I was standing in. I smoked and sipped.

By the time I was tipping up the glass for the dregs, I’d finished two cigarettes. I hadn’t moved forward with my thinking and I understood this was because my thinking had nowhere to go. I had no idea where they could be. I couldn’t even make a wild guess.

I picked up my butts and threw them over the fence into the builder’s yard, trudged back across the shallow beach and let myself in. I locked the door behind me and hoped that if and when they returned they had a key of their own. That gave me an idea.

I hurried back upstairs to search for their bunches of keys. I found one in the kitchen in my aunt’s handbag; the handbag I had already seen three times and not thought anything of; the handbag my aunt never left the house without, even if she was only going next door to the general store. I opened it: purse, tissues, paper, keys, hairbrush, saccharin, compact, lipstick. Shit.

So maybe they had left in a hurry, I reasoned. Maybe they had to dash on an errand of mercy – not far or the car would be gone. Local then. Very local. Maybe a friend in need had summoned them. An emergency. They would know I would be resourceful enough to get myself to Dymchurch, to let myself in, to make myself at home. I liked this more and more until I got to asking myself why neither had phoned me in that case and why both their mobile phones were still in the flat. And why was my aunt’s handbag still here? One step forward, two steps back.

I poured another small one. It was getting late. I was getting tired. Istanbul is two hours ahead of the UK and it was catching up with me. The day’s travel, the draining worry and the whisky weren’t helping. I thought about going to bed in my old room. Impossible.

I went back through to the lounge, closed the curtains, pulled the blanket off the back of the sofa, put the telly back on and lay down to wait.

***

3

I didn’t open my eyes again until gone eight the next morning. I felt bad for that. Alone on the lumpy couch, fully clothed under a thin throw, I’d had my best night’s sleep for months.

Traffic in the high street was heavier now. I lay collecting my thoughts listening to the constant background noise of passing tyres on the wet road the other side of the glass and one floor down. The people of the Marsh commuting off it to work and outsiders commuting in. A paradox that seemed to be lost on most I’d ever mentioned it to.

It was immediately obvious my relatives hadn’t returned, but I looked and called out anyway. I had to.

I was now suitably concerned for their welfare. I had been the previous evening, but then it had all seemed so unreal and confusing that I had expected them to return with a logical explanation that just hadn’t occurred to me. In the intemperate grey light of day, despite no evidence, I was starting to believe something bad might have happened to them.

I phoned Folkestone police station. The woman I was put through to said I should wait until they had been missing for twenty-four hours. That’s the way it was. I asked if she could tell me whether there had been any reports of any accidents involving a man and a woman of my relatives’ age the previous day. She said she didn’t have that kind of information. She advised me to ring the nearest hospitals – The William Harvey in Ashford and Victoria Hospital in Folkestone.

I could have kicked myself then. The idea of telephoning hospitals should have been one of my first. If one of them had had an accident it would explain why they might have left in a hurry and left everything personal behind. The woman also suggested I ask around our neighbours. If my relatives, or word of them, didn’t show up for twenty-four hours then I should call back and register them as missing.

I looked up the numbers of both hospitals and made my enquiries. It took a while to discover that no one fitting either description had been admitted within the last twenty-four hours.

I put the kettle on and stood staring out of the kitchen window. At the back of the flat the kitchen overlooked the builder’s yard – about a half-acre of land scattered with the rotting, rusting and redundant debris of a local building firm’s livelihood: old ship’s containers, cement mixers, scaffolding, piles of unused and reclaimed timber, pallets of bricks and roof tiles, aggregates of every description. And sprouting unchecked amongst it all patches of vegetation: brambles, nettles, intrusive weeds. It was a mess, an eyesore, but as far as my relatives were concerned it was preferable to residential development.

That’s what the owner had been trying to do for as long as I could remember. Planning application after planning application to try to capitalise on the potential of the brownfield  land that was locked in on all sides by other people’s property. The only reason he was regularly turned down for anything and everything he proposed was access. Apparently, the track in wasn’t wide enough for whatever the council envisaged might need to use it.

The price and lack of available building land in the area made that parcel a precious plot if only someone could fashion a key to unlock its potential.

The kettle sang. I opened the fridge for milk. In the door were bottles of beer I liked. It told me someone had remembered I was due. I had an idea. I looked in my aunt’s purse and then her handbag. Then I looked in the bin. Then I dipped into the box my aunt stuffed all the plastic shopping bags into for rubbish sacks. I pulled out a couple of the local supermarket’s bags. In the second one I found what I was looking for: a receipt for the beer. It was dated the day before and indicated a morning transaction. It told me something, but it didn’t tell me anything.