Local Gone Missing(27)

BEFORE





Nineteen


SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 2019



Eight days earlier





Dee


The hostel in west London is like a big dirty hive with the residents buzzing around the entrance, sharing cigarettes, laughing, and pushing, and others sitting on the wall, dead eyed, with secret cans of Special Brew.

Everyone stops and looks at me when I push through to get to the door. I thought it would be hard to find the right place. The sort of place a quiet, pale man might stay when he came out of prison. But it stood out from the cheap hotels and flats as soon as I walked out of the tube station.

“I’m here to see Stuart Bennett,” I say.



* * *



—

The cheap carpet on the stairs is full of static and my hand sparks off the metal banister, making me jump.

He cracks the door open when I knock and all my confidence evaporates. We are only inches apart but he can’t hold my eye, flicking nervous glances beyond me. Looking for what’s coming. That’s what a lifetime inside must do.

“Hello, Stuart.” I dry-gulp over the words. “I’m Phil’s sister. Can I come in?”

His eyes go all wide and I think he’ll slam the door but he lets me in. He looks so old—his skin has that gray sheen from years in prison and all the dark hair I’d remembered has gone—it’s shaved close to his skull now. But the serpent tattoo is still there, wrapped round his neck. I was fascinated by that snake once. I sit on the stool closest to the door while he takes the bed, pulling the duvet up over his rumpled sheets. The room is so small, I can smell his instant-coffee breath.

He keeps looking away and I know I’ll have to push to get anywhere with him.

“How did you find me?” he says finally, and I shiver.

His soft lisp takes me somewhere else. And I’m standing in another room.

“The vigil,” I stutter.

“I didn’t see you.”

“No, I spoke to people who were there. They said Phil had been in touch with you.”

Stuart looks at me and I wonder what he sees. What he remembers. If he sees me as I was—a kid with plaits, in a dress two sizes too small. And I tug my fringe over my eyes.

“Yeah. He wrote to me in prison last year and came to see me. I hardly recognized him, he looked so rough.”

“Why did he come? What did he want?”

“He wanted to say sorry.”

“What for?” I say, and he looks away again.

“For wrecking my life. He said it was because of him that I was in prison.”

“Phil? How was he responsible? He wasn’t even there,” I say.

And he looks at me.

“No. But he sent me,” he says.

“Phil did?” I say too loudly, and he recoils.

“He gave me the address, told me there was good stuff in there. And he knew the owner would be out. Phil would sell the stuff for me. I was going to hand it over that night. But that didn’t happen. Anyway, Phil told me all about why he’d done it. It took a lot for him to come and tell me,” Stuart says, and stops. He grips the duvet cover as if he’s about to fall. “And I told him about that night. How it all went wrong. All wrong,” he whispers. “About the lad and the girl who should never have been there. Phil hadn’t known. He swore he hadn’t. But I told him everything—all the stuff that never came out in the trial—and he sat and cried.”

I can’t speak. I just sit there while he goes on, talking about how he’d like to follow Phil’s example and make his peace. But all I can think of is the Phil who sent Stuart to the house in Addison Gardens. He’d only just turned seventeen and looked younger. He was working for a landlord, banging on doors for rent. Collecting cash from people like him. People who were too poor to have bank accounts. And he hated it. It was when he started drinking. “Dutch courage,” he called it, and I didn’t like it. It made him too loud, like Tony. Looking back now, I can see he was a frightened kid but I keep asking myself if there’d been a side to him I hadn’t known. Had he been sending people to break into houses? I was only eight years old. I wouldn’t have known, would I? My son, Cal, is almost the same age I was then and what does he truly know about me?

But Phil cared about people. About me. He’d never have left me on my own to go robbing. He was home with me every night. Well, nearly every night.

My head wanders further on. I know it won’t lead anywhere good. I try to stop it but it keeps slipping out of my grasp. So I close my eyes.

Make it go away, Cal would say. Everything is so much simpler when you’re a kid, isn’t it?

“I don’t believe it,” I say, and Stuart stops talking and leans toward me. I think for a second that he’s going to take my hand and I freeze.

“My brother wasn’t like that,” I say, tucking my hands under my thighs.

“No, he wasn’t,” Stuart says. “But there were people who were.”





Twenty


SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 2019



Seven days earlier





Charlie


He was working every hour of the day to raise money—going back to former contacts and old schemes—but he was getting nowhere.