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‘How long’s he got?’
‘It’s due Monday.’
‘And you don’t think you should ring his parents?’
‘He did disappear before you know.’
‘Disappear?’
‘Well, took off for a few days. Never said where he’d gone or anything.’
‘Did you ever find out where he went?’
She shook her head. ‘That was before Nikki.’
‘What’s their relationship like?’
Jan pulled a face. ‘Nikki knows Matt’s out of her league – that’s what’s driving her mental.’
‘He must like her. They’ve been going out together for nearly a year,’ I said.
‘Yeah.’ She shrugged her shoulders like she was genuinely bemused by the whole thing.
‘Is there someone else?’ I asked again.
She hesitated and I knew she was searching her conscience. I leaned closer to her. ‘We’re just trying to make sure he’s OK,’ I said. ‘We’re not looking to get him into trouble.’
‘Last night, I got a few phone calls where the phone was silent every time I picked it up. I don’t know whether it was Nikki, or just …’
Jan’s gaze had fixed on the window. She stood up and crossed the room and stared out into the street. I couldn’t see what had caught her interest. She swore under her breath and it sounded like a gust of wind.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘That’s Matt’s car.’
I got up and peered out of the bay window in the direction she pointed, followed her gaze to the burgundy Volkswagen Polo parked a few hundred yards further down the street. I hadn’t noticed it on my way there, but I’d come from the other direction.
Jan turned and ran from the room. I followed her, through the front door back into the street. I wondered how I’d not noticed it earlier, but I’d been focused on the house, and a car with a smashed window isn’t that much of an unusual occurrence in Leeds 6. As I got closer though, I realized it wasn’t just a smashed window. In fact there wasn’t a single pane of glass intact – front and rear windscreen, every window, shattered. Another couple of steps and I realized the headlights and taillights were destroyed as well. The shards crunched under my feet.
‘Shit,’ said Jan again.
‘Vandals?’ I said.
Jan looked up and down the street. ‘Why just his car?’
She had a point. There were other, more attractive cars parked along the street. ‘Which is Tuff’s?’ I asked.
‘Tuff doesn’t have a car.’
‘Oh. How did he get back from the party?’
‘Should I ring the police?’
‘He must have come back in a car. The party was in Lincolnshire.’
Jan stood blinking at the Volkswagen like she was willing the glass back into the panes. I looped around it and tried to read the message it sent. Anger. Raw, unchannelled anger, you could smell it. Every single body panel was dented, same for the bonnet. It looked like it had been attacked with a baseball bat.
‘Didn’t you hear anything?’
‘You don’t think Nikki …?’ Jan’s voice tailed off.
I frowned as I considered the idea, but it didn’t add up. ‘Don’t think so. I mean she’s worried, but she didn’t strike me as angry. Least, not this angry.’
‘What should I do?’ Jan turned to me and I realized she’d got worried for the first time.
‘Phone the police. Report it.’
‘And tell them Matt’s missing?’
I still find it difficult to think of the police as anything other than the enemy. Too much soft drug consumption. That’s my soft drug consumption, not theirs. But I remembered the roasting we’d got from not involving them earlier in our last case. ‘Don’t think you’ve got a choice,’ I said. I peered in through the driver’s window. Or the space where the window once was. ‘Radio’s still there. Doesn’t look like anything’s been stolen.’ The glove box was closed. I pulled my head back out. ‘Is Tuff insured? To drive it?’
‘I’m not dealing with this,’ Jan said. She held up her hands in front of her like she was trying to stop traffic. She turned towards the house. I still had my notebook and pen in hand so I wrote down the registration number and followed Jan back across the road.
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ she said, talking to herself. ‘This is Tuff’’s problem.’
I followed her into the house, back into the front room. She picked up a denim jacket from the back of the settee. ‘I don’t know anything. I haven’t got time. I’m late. They’re not the only ones with deadlines.’
‘Why don’t I tell Tuff, then he can sort it?’ I said. ‘You said he’s at the library?’
‘Not my drama,’ she said, still shaking her head.
I stuffed my notebook into my bag. We were obviously leaving. ‘What time will he be there till?’
‘Don’t know. He works Thursdays.’ She grabbed a bag and a ring binder from the floor in the hall.
‘Works where?’
‘The bookshop.’ She was out the front door, standing on the step waiting for me to leave so she could shut the front door. ‘The one opposite the uni.’
I stepped out of the house and she slammed the door behind me, locked it and put the key in her pocket.
‘What time does he start?’
But she didn’t hear me. Or if she did she didn’t acknowledge it. She was already out of the gate and headed down the street towards town. I watched her stride away until she turned left at the end and disappeared from sight.
Chapter Six (#ulink_e675648a-21aa-5e8b-a9b5-fb57816a721f)
I caught the bus to Hyde Park Corner and threaded my way through the streets back to the office. Aunt Edie was at the computer, two-finger typing and swearing under her breath as I slung my bag onto my desk. I noticed Jo was wearing her hangover lipstick – dark purple, like crushed blueberries.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked.
‘Matt’s house.’
‘Why didn’t you answer your mobile?’
‘Oh.’ I pulled open my desk drawer and rummaged. ‘It needs charging,’ I said, holding my new iPhone aloft.
‘You’re supposed to charge it at night so that it’s ready every morning,’ Jo said, snatching it off me and plugging it into the wall socket. ‘How many more times?’
‘I went for a run – had a chat with Matt’s housemate, Jan. She said he disappeared once before – didn’t show for days.’
‘Told you,’ said Jo. ‘He’ll show up with numb nuts and a hangover, I’d bet money on it. Or he knows she’s preggers and he’s moved to the Outer Hebrides. You know what men are like.’
‘But,’ I said, crossing the room and pulling the file from the cabinet, ‘his car’s been done over, like, seriously done over.’
‘Crap,’ said Aunt Edie.
I frowned at Jo. ‘What’s she doing?’
‘She’s doing my head in, that’s what she’s doing.’
I glanced back at Aunt Edie. Her glasses had fallen to the tip of her nose and her lips were pursed but she didn’t appear to have heard Jo’s comment. I raised my eyebrows at Jo. We both know Aunt Edie doesn’t take criticism well.
Jo shrugged her shoulders like she didn’t care. ‘She’s typing up Martin’s notes. Thought I might as well get her doing something, seeing as how we didn’t know where you were.’
I put my notes from my interview with Jan into the file and thought about what we had. A possible date in Old Bar today at 2 p.m. And Tuff. We needed to speak to him – it looked like he was the last person to see Matt – and maybe he could shed some light on what had happened to Matt’s car. The bookshop was opposite the university Union, which housed Old Bar. It made sense to combine the two appointments, not that Tuff knew we were coming. A glance at the clock above the filing cabinet told me it wasn’t even ten. I dropped the file with my notes onto Aunt Edie’s desk so she could type them up later. She peered at her computer screen and cursed again.
Call me sensitive, but I was picking up on an atmosphere. Luckily, I’ve been mates with Jo long enough to know what she needed. ‘Why don’t we take a drive to see the flats where the woman’s body was found? Martin said they overlook Roundhay Park. There’s got to be a café round there somewhere. I’ll buy breakfast.’
Jo and I left the office together. I didn’t even take my jacket. The van was parked just round the corner, and I clambered into the passenger seat and got that buzz I always get when I know we’re leaving our normal. A trip. Probably I need to get out more.
We had to negotiate the mad ballet dance that is the Sheepscar Interchange, which involved a few car horns and Jo sticking the Vs up out of the window as the satnav lady fired directions at us. We eventually joined Roundhay Road, which takes you out to the north-east of the city.
Leeds 6 is a bubble: it insulates against the real world. Its only inhabitants are the young, the impressionable and the idealistic. The shops are all takeaways, off-licences, laundrettes and taxi firms, so there’s never any pressing reason to go anywhere else. But as Jo drove us down a hill, into Roundhay Park, and we caught a glimpse of the enormous lake, I thought perhaps we should have made more of an effort and visited before.
‘I googled Roundhay Park this morning, while you were out, running.’ Jo made the last word sound like a euphemism.
I rose above it. ‘And?’
‘It was bought by the mayor of the city, for the people of Leeds, a couple of hundred years ago.’
‘That was nice of him.’
‘Before that it was privately owned. There’s a stately home at the top.’
I peered out of the windows but all I could see was parkland.
Jo turned into the car park at the bottom of the hill and reverse parked into a space. ‘Roundhay Park had its own serial killer, once upon a time,’ she said.
‘The Park Killer? That was here?’
You couldn’t live in Leeds and not have heard of the Park Killer. He was a serial killer who’d killed all of his female victims in parks, hence the moniker. He’d been caught by a late-night dog-walker, who’d discovered him cutting up his final victim in bushes and had made a citizen’s arrest. According to folklore, the dog, a black Labrador, had pinned the killer down, holding him until the police arrived. Some people claimed the Park Killer had been inspired by the Yorkshire Ripper, who’d stalked Leeds’ streets back in the seventies, but the truth was no one really knew what had motivated him to do what he had done, because the Park Killer committed suicide in prison, before his case had come to trial. I glanced around.
‘He killed two women here,’ Jo said. ‘Think the others were in Meanwood.’
‘Fucked up,’ I said.
We climbed out of the van and surveyed our surroundings. ‘The flats are up there,’ said Jo, pointing to the crest of the park.
‘Food first,’ I said. I’m not stupid. Hanging out with Jo when her blood sugar is low is taking your life in your hands.
We made our way over to the Lakeside café – a wooden building jutting out over the lake – and I ordered us both a full English breakfast with an espresso for Jo. We sat on the balcony, the sun glistened off the water, swans and ducks glided past, and I filled Jo in on the details of my conversation with Jan while we waited for breakfast to arrive.
‘Matt could have easily popped home Sunday,’ Jo said when I told her everything I could remember. ‘Picked up his stuff and bought a single ticket away from planet parenthood.’
‘Seems weird that he’d know Nikki was pregnant before she even did. And Jan said she couldn’t tell whether any of his stuff was missing.’
‘He’s probably out getting laid in between typing up his dissertation.’
‘What about his car?’
‘Or getting laid while some woman types up his dissertation. A woman on my course did that. Typed up her boyfriend’s dissertation. He dumped her like a week later.’
I paused as the waitress arrived and handed us two plates brimming with sausage, eggs and beans. Jo poured vinegar onto her fried eggs – she likes them dripping with the stuff.
‘There’s the note in the pigeonhole as well,’ I pointed out. ‘Someone else is looking for him.’
‘Could be weeks old, that note. And from anybody.’ Jo spooned a forkful of baked beans on her slice of bread, folded it over and took a bite.
‘We’ll find out this afternoon,’ I said. ‘Even if Matt doesn’t turn up, the person who wrote it might.’
‘Might,’ Jo stressed as she chewed on her baked bean sandwich.
‘Not like we’ve got anything else to go on.’
We ate the rest of our breakfast in silence. I watched the colour return to Jo’s skin as she ate. When her plate was empty she poured the last of her coffee down her throat and licked her fingers. ‘Delish. I’ll have that sausage if you’re not going to eat it.’
*
After breakfast, we climbed the steep hill to the flats at the top. When I think flats I always picture council sky-rises, like the ones that mark the edge of the city in Little London, or new-build student halls of residence, which remind me of battery hen coops. These flats weren’t like those. White stucco, with huge portrait-shaped windows, built on the crest of the hill overlooking the park and the lake. Location-wise, it didn’t get much better. Apart from the wooden café, there wasn’t a single building in sight from the top of the hill, just miles of green parkland.
Jo put her hands in the small of her back as we surveyed the vista. ‘Not bad, eh?’ Roundhay Park stretched before us, a natural flat-bottomed bowl, with what looked like a cricket pitch at its base. I was reminded of school and my geography teacher droning on and on about glaciation. We were high up, above the trees. From where we were it looked like you’d be able to trampoline in them. ‘U2 played there,’ said Jo, pointing down the slopes. ‘And Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Robbie Williams, Ed Sheeran – apparently the acoustics are well good.’
Martin’s notes included a detailed description of where the woman’s body was found. To get into the grounds we had to walk down a small road that ended just behind the flats. The gates were open and it was easy to slip inside. A car park with more than its fair share of convertibles and BMWs stood between us and the rear of the building. Surrounding the car park were well-established trees and shrubs. ‘What are we going to say? If anyone asks?’
That’s the thing about leaving the Leeds 6 bubble – you become aware of how different you are to ‘normal’ society. It’s unusual to see anyone over twenty-five in Leeds 6 and the dress code is relaxed to say the least. I was still wearing my denim cut-offs and Jo was in her hangover outfit – baggy trousers she’d picked up in Thailand and a sweatshirt that had the neck and cuffs removed.
In the park and around the café, I’d seen old people walking dogs, kids running around, an Asian couple feeding the ducks, mothers with prams. The prams had made me think of Nikki. What a weird thing, to grow another life. I shook the thought from my head and concentrated on our surroundings.
