LITMIR.BIZ

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at the Queens?’ asked Jo. ‘I hear the breakfasts are pretty good.’

      ‘Never mind that,’ said Mrs Wilkins. ‘How are you getting on?’

      ‘We’ve run into a couple of problems,’ Jo said, and I hated her for being so blunt, for not shying away from the truth.

      ‘Nothing serious,’ I lied, as I took a seat on the broken coffee table that was propping up the desk. ‘But there’s a few questions we need to ask.’

      ‘The main one being—’

      I cut Jo off with one of my hard stares. I don’t do them much, so when I do, Jo takes notice. I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle.

      ‘What’s happened?’

      I guessed what she was thinking. It’s obvious, if you’ve ever lost someone. You think the worst. You think about dead bodies, and possible suicides, cold canals, horrific car smashes. You think about the pictures you thought you’d never have to imagine, the headlines that used to read like fiction, things that would never happen to you. I wanted to reassure her, but I wasn’t sure I had the words.

      ‘You see, the thing is, Mrs Wilkins, we spoke to his girlfriend and she says—’

      ‘Carly?’

      ‘You know her?’

      ‘No. Not really.’

      ‘You know her name,’ I said.

      ‘He mentioned her, the last time I saw him.’

      ‘At Christmas,’ Jo said, her voice rising like she was checking a fact.

      ‘I wasn’t sure whether it would develop into anything serious. I assumed they’d split up. Does she know where he is?’

      ‘No. She hasn’t seen him. He was supposed to meet her, and he didn’t show up.’

      ‘Meet her where?’

      Jo opened her mouth to answer, but I didn’t give her chance. Something about the whole situation was giving me the heebie-jeebies. ‘We can’t give out that kind of information. Not at this stage in the investigation. We’re eliminating people from our enquiries.’

      She paused, and I heard her light a cigarette. ‘What did they say at the squat?’

      ‘Same. He disappeared last Friday – no one’s seen him since. Well, no one we’ve spoken to.’

      ‘He was good friends with someone in the squat. Brownie, I think he said. Have you spoken to him?’

      I didn’t like the way she seemed to know more than she’d let on the day before – yesterday she knew nothing, now it was like she was directing us around our own investigation. I decided to grasp the nettle. ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you a couple more questions.’

      ‘Like?’

      I inhaled. There was no polite way to put this. ‘His girlfriend, Carly, is under the impression that Jack’s mother, well, that Jack’s mother passed over.’ I know, don’t ask me why – I’ve never said ‘passed over’ in my whole life before. ‘When he was 5.’

      Mrs Wilkins muttered something that sounded to my ears like: ‘Never talks about it.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Nothing. Just, obviously they’re very close.’

      ‘So,’ I said, when it became obvious she wasn’t going to volunteer any information. ‘Do you know why she might have said that?’

      ‘I do.’

      Another silence that seemed to stretch into the distance. ‘Why did you tell us that you’re—’

      ‘Jack’s stepmother. I married his father after his mother died.’ She cleared her throat. ‘He was heartbroken. Still is. It’s taken years for him to come to terms with it. She was an amazing woman.’

      ‘Must be hard. To match up to a dead, amazing woman,’ said Jo, pulling a face at me as she spoke into the phone.

      ‘I don’t look at it like that,’ came back Mrs Wilkin’s voice. ‘I feel grateful to her.’ Jo stuck two fingers down her throat and pretended to vomit. I don’t know whether Mrs Wilkins had an inkling of what was going on in our offices, but her next sentence seemed pointed and directed at Jo. ‘Women shouldn’t be in competition with each other. If more women—’

      ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ interrupted Jo.

      ‘Didn’t seem relevant,’ she said, and I heard her light another cigarette. ‘To all intents and purposes, I am Jack’s mother. He’s a lost soul, was a lost soul, when I met him. Haunted, really.’

      ‘You got any other children?’

      ‘Am I under investigation in my own investigation?’

      There was ice in her voice and an awkward pause as Jo and I glanced at each other.

      I flinched first. ‘It’s just the more background we have, the better and the quicker we’ll find him. Has Jack got any siblings?’

      ‘Have you managed to find out anything? Besides he’s got a girlfriend?’

      Jo and I had rehearsed this on our way down to the office that morning. How much to tell.

      ‘He’s moved out of the squat,’ I said. ‘And he didn’t leave a forwarding address.’

      ‘And he hasn’t been into work to collect his wages,’ Jo added. ‘No one’s seen him for a week.’

      ‘We were wondering whether we should go to the police,’ I said.

      ‘I hire a team of private investigators and your first idea is to go to the police?’

      I screwed up my courage. ‘We’re worried something may have happened to him. Something, you know, something bad.’ I prayed Jo wouldn’t revisit the list of possible catastrophes.

      ‘No.’ Mrs Wilkins’s voice was firm down the phone. ‘No, I’d know if something, something like that had happened to him. I don’t want the police involved, not until I know what this is about.’

      I glanced at Jo. Neither of us had been particularly keen on the police idea. We’d always seen them as the enemy, the hard black line on demonstrations, the invisible tail on stoned car journeys, the possible tap on the line as we ordered our recreational drugs. And, of course, after what happened with Andy. Well, let’s just say it’s hard to contemplate the idea of voluntarily involving them in our lives.

      ‘Did his flatmates say anything about where he might be?’

      ‘Not really.’ We’d decided not to mention the letter. Or the drugs. ‘He did a moonlight flit.’

      ‘What about Brownie then? Have you spoken to him?’

      ‘We’ve still more interviews to do,’ said Jo.

      ‘What’s the plan?’

      Interesting question, and at that point I couldn’t put into words the sense of unease that was hanging around my shoulders like a cloak. I knew she wouldn’t be that chuffed if we told her our next move was to track down her husband. I knew she had a very clear idea as to how we should run the investigation and poking around, testing the edges of her story, wasn’t it.

      ‘We need a phone number,’ I said. ‘We need to be able to contact you. We’re out and about for the rest of the day.’

      ‘Where?’

      ‘Following up some enquiries on the girlfriend,’ I said.

      ‘What enquiries?’

      That was as far as I’d got. ‘She’s from Huddersfield,’ I improvised. ‘Her parents might be hiding Jack.’

      ‘I

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