The Sun Will Still Shine Tomorrow (10 page)

He looked at Markham.

“Who are the good guys, Holy John?”

Markham furrowed his brow then smiled.

“You and me, Ash, we’re the good guys. Now let’s get in there and get this out the way. Then we can go and fight the baddies, the undesirables, clean the streets up.”

Ashley Clarke nodded.

“Let’s do it, John, let’s go and fight the bad guys.”

Markham grinned broadly.

“That’s my partner, the bad guys, let’s go and get them.”

Ashley took his seat once again. John Markham resumed his position under the window. Ashley looked at Roddam who raised his eyebrows as if to say ‘are you ready’ and Chief Superintendent Harrison looked at him with a look that said he was spoiling for a fight.

“So, Ashley,” Roddam started, “are you feeling a little better now?”

“Down from the hilltops now,” smirked Chief Superintendent Harrison.

The bad guy… he’s the bad guy
.

“Yes, sir, a lot better. I must apologise for my actions before.”

He glanced across at Chief Superintendent Harrison. “I was out of order. I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately, what with the move and things.”

“Is that your excuse for those racist remarks, officer?” Chief Superintendent Harrison taunted.

“What racist remarks would that be, sir?”

Chief Superintendent Harrison hauled off his glasses quickly, in a deliberate gesture, a gesture that said ‘don’t push me’.

“I’m beginning to lose my patience with you, DC Clarke. You know why you’re here. The only reason you’re not in the dole queue right now is because you have the full support of your commanding officer. DCI Gibbons speaks very highly of you too.”

“You want me out of the job, Chief Superintendent Harrison, is that what you are saying?”

Ashley wanted to be back there, in the job, be enthusiastic just like in the old days but his heart just wasn’t in it anymore. He was fighting for his career, his livelihood and he was on the ropes with his gumshield on the floor, legs like lead.

The Chief Superintendent stood up. He peered down at Ashley.

“I don’t want racists in the force, Clarke.”

The comment grated on Ashley. He clenched his fists, took a deep breath.

“I’m not a racist, Chief Superintendent Harrison. Never have been, never will be. I’m not a racist and I never meant the comment in a racist way. If you want to interpret it that way then it’s your problem, not mine. My remark simply shortened the country of a person’s birth. A Pakistani will always be called a Paki, a Scotsman a Scot, an Irishman a paddy. “

“Well, they shouldn’t be, officer. People should think before they call an Irishman a paddy. They should think before they speak, think how distressing it is for the person concerned.”

Ashley smiled.

“Distressing, sir? The kid wasn’t even there, for God’s sake, how could he get distressed?”

Ashley’s voice had risen a decibel or two; it was trembling, beginning to croak. This interview was getting sillier and sillier.

“It makes no difference, officer, if you use it behind his back or not, it can still cause distress.”

“I was called Geordie in the Met for nearly fifteen years, told I was a Scotsman with his brains kicked out. I didn’t exactly like it but I wouldn’t say it stressed me out. My partner was called Taffy, no guesses where he came from. Are you saying I was racially abused? Are you saying that John Evans suffered emotional traumas? And what about Andrej Bojke? His father was an immigrant from Poland. Everyone called him Andy the Pole. Everyone from the cleaners up over. He was Andy the Pole

“Has he been racially abused for all those years, does he have a case against the Met for racial harassment throughout his career?”

Chief Superintendent Harrison looked confused, angry that Ashley had dared to defend his remark.

“No, of course not, that’s different.”

“No, it’s not, sir, it’s exactly the same. We had a lad from Glasgow called the sweaty, he hated the name. Imagine going through life called a sweaty sock, how bad is that?”

“Look, Officer Clarke, this conversation has gone far enough. We’re not here to discuss nicknames from the past, we’re here to address a serious racist incident.”

“And what about Bob the Fish?”

“What?”

“Bob the Fish, a copper in my unit. He had two huge protruding eyes and got Bob the Fish.”

Superintendent Harrison resembled Bob the Fish now. Big bulging eyes, puffed up around the gills. Ashley was surprised steam wasn’t coming from his ears.

Roddam shook his head, held it in his hands. John Markham gave Ashley a stiff finger in the ribs as if to say drop it. But he wouldn’t, his hackles were well and truly standing on end.

“Everyone has to be born somewhere, sir. Everyone is taunted or teased about where they are born, it’s part of life. Take the North-East; what Newcastle man hasn’t been called a Geordie bastard at some time in their lives and what about the Mackems and the Smoggies? What about the poor bastards from Hartlepool?”

Harrison removed his glasses.

“If you must know, Clarke, I was born in Hartlepool. What’s wrong with that?”

Ashley grinned.

“My father served in the Navy. He was stationed there, but what has that–”

“You’re a monkey hanger,” he laughed, “a fucking monkey hanger. Do the lads at your station down South know that?”

Chief Superintendent Harrison fell back into his seat, Rod dam’s mouth gaped open in amazement; the second time Ashley Clarke had dared to utter the F-word. John Markham’s hand covered his eyes and he shook his head in disbelief. It was all over, no going back now.

“That’s racism, sir.”Ashley grinned, felt composed.”During the Napoleonic war your ancestors hung a monkey because they thought it was a French spy. And they have the nerve to call the Irish stupid.”

He turned slightly as he looked and smiled at his superintendent. Then back to the suit. John Markham dropped his head in his hands and started groaning.

“Dozy bastards.” He was laughing now. “The fucking monkey couldn’t speak to answer the charges so they hung it. You’re a monkey hanger, sir. Harrison, the monkey hanger. Got a bit of a ring to it, don’t you think?”

Ashley exhaled deeply, took another deep breath. “Is that good enough for you or do you need some physical violence too? Verbal racism is a little harder to prove, I believe.”

Ashley leant forward, took the Chief Superintendent by the lapels.

“H’angus the monkey Harrison.”

He pulled his fist back and took aim at the bridge of his nose. John Markham sprang forward and held him in a bear hug before he could dispatch the blow. Roddam dived across the desk too, his huge clumsy frame upending it spilling the neatly stacked paperwork onto the floor. The desktop computer slid across the shiny surface and crashed to the floor. The screen smashed into a thousand fragments with a bang.

And suddenly, as Ashley lay on the floor with two of his colleagues restraining him, he calmed down. He smiled and closed his eyes and felt the anxieties and frustrations that had built up over fifteen years simply float away.

Ashley looked up at the old brass sign that read ‘Milburn House’.

It was like something from a bygone era. As he walked through the door the feeling didn’t disappear.

“The building time forgot,” he muttered to himself. “Jesus, it even smells old.”

But not an unpleasant smell, he thought to himself as he checked out the nameplates and found the office name he was looking for:
Just Flirting
, a dating agency. He stole a quick look behind him just to make sure no one was looking at him as he fingered the sign.

He made his way up to the fourth floor and sauntered along the gloomy passage with no real urgency to get there. What would he say when he walked in? He lingered at the huge glass door and gave it a half-hearted push. To his dismay, it swung open effortlessly and he was greeted with a beaming, shiny white smile from a twenty-something brunette.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Erm, yes, I’m looking for a lady.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place. Can I take your name?”

“No… I mean, yes… Ashley Clarke.”

“Okay, Ashley, take a seat and we’ll get some details.”

“No, you misunderstand. I’m looking for Kate Wilkinson; she’s the boss here, isn’t she?”

The girl flicked Ashley a disapproving look.

“Ms Wilkinson. Yes, I’ll just get her. She’s the owner, not the boss. We like to work as a team here.”

Ashley walked over to the seating area adjacent to the receptionist’s desk. He pawed at a magazine,
Vogue,
and then he picked up a
Tatler
. Pretty people graced the front covers and he wondered just how many of
Just Flirting
’s client base fell into that category.

Within two minutes Kate Wilkinson breezed into reception.

“Aaashleey….”

The sight took Ashley’s breath away. She could have passed for a lady ten years younger. She hugged him tightly and held him for an uncomfortable length of time. The receptionist over his shoulder clearly disapproved. He broke the grip. She kissed him on the lips, brushed a tear away from her eyes.

“Oh, Ashley, it’s so nice to see you again. It must be ten years.”

“All of that, Kate. You look errr… stunning.”

And she did. She wore a tight-fitting burgundy-coloured business suit with a brilliant white gentleman’s open-neck shirt. Her figure wouldn’t have looked out of place on a teenage catwalk model and she wore just enough make-up to accentuate her high cheekbones and delicate features.

“Thanks, Ash, you don’t look so bad yourself.”

Ashley blushed, not because of her comment. It was the sort of blush he had had whenever he had called at Tom’s door all those years ago. And those feelings, those sexual yearnings flowed back through his body again.

“Come through. Come through to my office.” She took his hand and led him forward.

“Hold all calls for me, would you, Sandie. Say for the next half an hour or so.”

The girl on reception nodded and ludicrously made a note on her desk pad. Ashley walked past a temporary dividing wall and into the main office. Four very attractive girls sat at workstations, all deep in conversation on the sort of headphones you find in a modern call centre.

Kate Wilkinson pointed at a large oak-panelled door in the far corner.

“My office is over there, Ash. Go take a seat, I’ll arrange some coffee. How do you take it, Ashley?”

“Black, Kate, please, a sprinkling of sugar.”

“Looking after that figure, Ash, huh? Me too; once you hit the mid-thirties you’ve got to be a bit more careful, hit the gym, cut down on the wine.”

Ashley wanted to tell her that he hadn’t quite got to that stage yet. In fact he’d never
hit the gym,
as she called it and he was probably drinking more now than he had at nineteen or twenty. He’d need to do something about it soon. He was slipping into an all too familiar routine: a couple of beers at lunchtime, maybe a couple of glasses of wine in the evening. And yes… he’d noticed the old jeans and T-shirts were a little bit tighter these days.

He wanted to tell her that her gym routine had obviously worked a treat and maybe he could join her one day, but she had disappeared over the other side of the office talking to one of the girls.

As instructed, he meandered into Kate Wilkinson’s huge and rather impressive office. He stole a quick look at her personal effects. Those could tell an on-the-ball policeman an awful lot about someone.

Pictures of Tom.

Only Tom. Pictures when he was a baby and the more familiar-looking pictures as a teenager, the teenager Ashley knew and loved. And a recent picture, in the middle of her desk, maybe only a year or two old of Tom on a beach somewhere. Somewhere hot by the looks of it. Maybe Thailand, New Zealand, somewhere like that.

He picked it up. That grin, that devil-may-care attitude.
The sun will still shine tomorrow.
Kate caught him unawares, placed a cup in front of him.

“Eighteen months ago, Ash. The last photograph of him I have, the same one Northumbria police got.” She sighed, walked around the desk and sat down. Took a long drink from her cup, shook her head.”Not that they ever seemed interested.”

Ashley looked away from the photograph and into the sea-green, hypnotic eyes of Kate Wilkinson. They were just how he remembered.

“No offence to you, Ash, but I never even received the courtesy of one lousy phone call. It was me that did all the running, me that kept ringing HQ at Ponteland. And all I got was that it was being investigated, we’re doing our best, Mrs Wilkinson, or a sympathetic female civilian explaining the statistics of missing persons, how they’d sometimes turn up at the family home years later as if nothing had happened.”

She continued.

“Once I even marched right in there, demanded to see the man at the top. I was crying, in a right state. He’d been missing a fortnight. I was frantic with worry.”

“A fortnight isn’t long, Kate, you can’t blame them.”

“You’re right, Ash. A fortnight isn’t long for a son not to call his mother but as much as Tom was unreliable and took off every now and again on a whim, he would religiously call me wherever he was in the world… every few days. Call it Mother’s intuition if you like, I knew something was wrong. I wanted to get a hold of those policemen and shake some sense into them. I must have rung his mobile phone two or three hundred times.”

Ashley wanted to say he understood. He stayed silent.

“I had a call from him, said he was going up to Holy Island.”

“Holy Island?”

“Yeah, up near Berwick, you know it?”

Ash nodded.

“He’d just packed the latest job in. They’d kept it open for him while he’d been on his latest venture but felt he wanted to move on.” She smiled at Ashley, took another sip from the cup. “I don’t need to tell you what he’s like, Ashley, you know him better than most. I remember it well because he called from a payphone, said his mobile didn’t receive on the island.”

Kate Wilkinson’s hands were trembling now. The tears were clearly visible in those beautiful green eyes that Ashley couldn’t break away from. He wanted to reach across the desk and comfort her, he wanted to say something profound, and something that reassured her that her son was alive and well.

“He said he wanted a few days away, somewhere quiet, somewhere to chill out. He told me not to worry. Not to worry, Ash. Can you believe it? He’d booked into a small inn, ‘The Ship’ on the island.”

A slight smile, another gulp at the coffee, then a sigh.

“Said he’d met a nice girl, Clara, he said she was called, though I’m not too sure. I might be wrong. That’s where she was from, Holy Island.”

Ashley reached in his pocket, pulled out a notepad and a pen.

“Guess I’d better get some details, the Ship Inn, you said.”

Kate Wilkinson looked up from her cup, gulping at the hot liquid in her mouth. She placed the cup on the desk without really looking where she was putting it. It tipped over as it came to rest unevenly on a thick desk diary, spilling coffee on some papers before she grasped at the cup and managed to right it. She didn’t seem at all concerned.

“You mean you’ll find out what happened to him, Ashley?”

Without giving him time to answer, Kate Wilkinson was on her feet and around Ashley’s side of the desk throwing her arms around him. She released her grip, composed herself and smoothed her skirt down flat against her hips as she straightened up once again.

“Oh thanks, Ashley, thank you so much. I’m so grateful… so, so grateful. It means so much to me.”

And then a look. A look that Ashley Clarke recognised so well. It was a look of resignation. He’d caught the look every time a criminal had finally realised that he or she had been caught in the trap. No escape. No get out of jail card, no pass go, no collect two hundred pounds.

The look that said,’ Okay, you got me’.

And the tears, those tears beginning to form again, distorting her vision, another few seconds and the first one would fall.

“You don’t believe we’ll find him alive, Kate, do you?”

A different look. Be sympathetic. Help me.

“Like I said, Ashley, Mother’s intuition.” She walked slowly around the desk and sat down in the oversized black leather chair. She reached for the cup of coffee but, before it reached her lips, thought better of it and returned it to the desk.

“I sensed something a couple of days after that phone call. He sounded fine on the phone, said he would call by the weekend. Even before then, the Thursday it was, around eight or nine in the evening, I experienced a feeling like I’d never had before.”

She stood up. Turned her back on Ashley and stared deep into the photograph of Tom hanging there. He couldn’t have been more than five years old, that cheeky grin evident even at that early age.

She turned around.

“I tell a lie, Ashley, I had experienced it before.” She hesitated. “Once or twice as a teenager. Remember falling in love, Ashley? Remember the feeling when the person you were dating was the most important creature in the world; remember thinking they were even more special than your parents?”

The inevitable tear trickled onto her delicate and beautifully formed cheek. The mascara followed a split second later.

“And remember the phone call that said it was over? Worse even, your best pal ringing up to say they’d been seen with someone else.”

Ashley remembered.

A vision of Alexis appeared at that exact moment and he knew precisely the feeling Kate Wilkinson was describing.

That night. The thoughts flying around his head, the knot in his stomach, the feeling that the world as he knew it could never be the same again. That feeling. So powerful. So strong.

“On that Thursday evening… that’s what I felt like, Ashley, only a hundred times worse and it stayed with me until the early hours of Friday morning.”

And slowly, as if in slow motion, she sank back and moulded herself into her seat again.

“I knew, Ashley. I knew then he was dead. I know he’s dead.”

“Don’t be silly, Kate, you can’t possibly know that.”

Kate Wilkinson didn’t reply to the statement.

“I went up to Holy Island, Ashley, when I realised that the police weren’t taking me seriously. I booked into The Ship. As soon as the receptionist clapped eyes on the credit card with the name Wilkinson on I swear the entire community clammed up. It was as if everyone knew, Ashley.”

“What do you mean, Kate? Knew what?”

“Knew why I was there, knew I was looking for him.”

“Is that what they said?”

Kate shook her head, climbed from her chair yet again, obviously uncomfortable, nervous relaying the story. She began a slow walk away from the desk, behind Ashley. He turned around on the seat, watched her pause by the door. He expected her to turn round and face him. She didn’t. She stood for what seemed like an eternity staring at the door that led out into the main office.

“To a man, woman and child, Ashley, they said they’d never seen hide nor hair of him. Never heard the name, never seen the face when I showed them the photograph. In fact, Ashley, I swear some people never even looked properly at the photograph before replying they’d never seen him before. I’d show them, hold up the photograph and they’d look right through it. It’s as if…”

“Go on. Tell me what you think.”

“It was as if the whole island was hiding something.”

Ashley fingered the handle on his coffee cup as a shiver ran up his back.

“The receptionist at The Ship looked through the bookings, said no one by the name of Wilkinson had reserved a room there. And yet, Ashley, he didn’t say he was going to book a room, he definitely said he’d booked one, even told me how reasonable it was.”

Ashley pushed his pen into his pocket. “I’ll make some enquiries back at the station, call in a few favours, see where they got to with the investigation.”

“I want to know, Ash. I just want to know. That’s not too much for a mother to ask, is it?”