Val McDermid - The Vanishing Point

Taken aback, he scratched his head. ‘Yeah, why not?’

I raked around in the fridge, all the while answering apparently pointless questions about Joshu and Scarlett. I ended up with two chicken salad wraps with Caesar dressing which I plonked on plates in front of us. ‘Not very exciting, I’m afraid. This is not the home of haute cuisine.’

He chuckled. ‘I imagine not.’

‘We have a very fine collection of home-delivery menus, however.’

‘Did you think Joshu and Scarlett would ever get back together?’ he asked through a mouthful of sandwich.

‘No chance,’ I said. ‘She loved him, but she knew she was better off without him. Getting cancer reset the zeros for her. She reordered her priorities and bad relationships was number one on the list of stuff she wasn’t going to do any more. She hasn’t so much as had a date with anyone since the divorce, never mind her diagnosis.’

He raised his eyebrows in a polite expression of dubiety. ‘Not according to the tabloids,’ he said.

I felt the sudden clench of horror in my chest. I’d let my guard slip and said something deeply, deeply stupid. It hadn’t been Scarlett in the papers. It had been Leanne putting on a show, of course. Was I so pathetic that a kind and attractive man could dismantle my careful barricades as if they were made of paper? ‘Not everything that’s in the tabloids is true,’ I said hastily. ‘It’s part of her job, to keep her name in the tabloids.’

He looked mildly scornful. ‘I suppose.’

I tried not to show my relief at having apparently got away with it. And it seemed Nick had run out of questions. So I took my chance. ‘How did you get to be a cop?’

‘I did a psychology degree. And I didn’t want to be any of the things people usually do with a psychology degree. The idea of being a detective interested me but I didn’t know if I could hack the journey to get there. I signed up without really knowing if I could cut it.’ He grinned and shrugged. ‘So far, so good.’ He finished his sandwich and stood up. ‘Thanks for feeding me. And thanks for filling in the background.’

‘It was an accident, wasn’t it? You don’t think it was deliberate?’

‘It’s not for me to say. I just present the information to my boss.’

‘Not even a hint?’

His eyes flicked from side to side. ‘Not even a hint. I’m sorry. I hope the kid’s OK. It’s hard to lose a parent that young.’

I was touched by his concern. But as he drove away, I found myself wishing Joshu’s death wasn’t quite so open and shut. I know it was a shitty thought, but I really wished I had an excuse to see Nick Nicolaides again.

37

Nick lingered outside Asmita Patel’s flat, leaning against his car in the chilly night air. There was a whiff of curry spices from a nearby restaurant on the breeze and the constant hum of London traffic. He thought about getting something to eat, but he was too antsy for food. He could go home and pick up a guitar and play till his fingers tired. But that wasn’t going to help Stephanie or Jimmy. Maybe if he went back to the office, he could find something useful to do.

The overhead lights were turned off in the squad room but a couple of pools of illumination revealed where colleagues were working late. As Nick made for his desk, a lone voice called out to him. ‘Jammy bastard, how did you get out of the bloody bunker?’ Davy the Fat Boy Brown had been assigned to the phone hacking and police corruption inquiry at the same time as Nick and he was even less suited to being stuck indoors with a bunch of suits.

‘I found a shittier stick to get hold of,’ Nick said, dropping into his chair and waking his computer from its hibernation. ‘Running errands for the FBI. As glamorous as Dagenham on a Sunday morning.’

Davy lumbered across to Nick’s desk. ‘You got a cup?’ He produced a bottle of Scotch with a couple of inches remaining.

‘You keep it,’ Nick said. ‘I’m too bloody tired already. If I have a drink, I’ll fall off my perch.’

Davy shambled off, grumbling. ‘I thought you Manchester lads were supposed to like partying?’

‘True, Davy. But you don’t have the right kind of tables for dancing on.’ He clicked on his message queue to see what was waiting for him. He scanned the list of incoming mail, ignoring anything related to the task he’d been temporarily spared. There were three others that promised relevance to what he cared more about. The first was from Cambridgeshire Police. The woman Nick had dubbed Megan the Stalker had ended up in a secure mental hospital in their force area so they’d been his first port of call. The email was short and to the point. Megan Owen had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act but she had been released six weeks previously. She was currently living in a supported hostel, where she had been abiding by the terms of her release. At eight o’clock that evening she had been in the common room watching a TV soap with three other residents. She definitely was not in Chicago kidnapping Jimmy Higgins.

That was a relief. It was never good news when nutters got their hands on small children. One down, a couple to go. According to West Yorkshire Police, Chrissie and Jade Higgins were both at home in the house Scarlett had bought for them. Neither woman seemed to be particularly bothered by the news of Jimmy’s abduction.

The other pertinent message was from the local nick in Peckham, which he’d asked to check on Pete Matthews’ whereabouts. Again, the message didn’t waste words. Pete Matthews was not at home. He was working away, according to a neighbour, who said he’d been gone for about six weeks. The neighbour had no idea where he was but said he knew Matthews had worked in the US, the Caribbean and South Africa in the past couple of years.

Nick felt the hairs on the back of his neck rising. Child abduction generally had three motivations. A parent who felt unjustly deprived of their child; ransom; and something deeply twisted. Pete Matthews definitely had a deeply twisted possible motive – he wanted to hurt Stephanie and he wanted to show her who was boss. He’d already stalked her, demonstrating that his take on what was reasonable behaviour was deeply skewed. And Nick didn’t know where he was tonight.

He thought back to his previous run-in with Pete Matthews. He’d had trouble tracking him down then as well, mostly because the man kept irregular hours and didn’t have a set place of work. He’d ended up making a list of recording studios and patiently working his way through the list till he found the one where Matthews had been currently working. If he checked back through his pocket books, that might give him a place to start.

Nick headed for his locker, where he kept his completed pocket books, the records of his daily tasks and accomplishments that would be his aide memoire when cases came to court. He tracked back to the relevant one and sat down then and there to flip through the pages, not caring about the dank smells of stale bodies and questionable drains that permeated the room. The Matthews notes were towards the end of the book, but they were perfectly clear. At the time Nick had confronted him about stalking Stephanie, he’d been mixing a trip-hop album at a place called Phat Phi D up in Archway. Wherever Pete was tonight, it wasn’t there. But they might know where he was.

He replaced his notebook and headed back to his car feeling unreasonably cheerful. He knew from his own occasional session work that record studios did not keep nine to five hours. The chances of finding someone still working close to midnight at Phat Phi D were better than evens, Nick reckoned.

It was nice to be proved right. A percussionist and a keyboard player were working on a backing track for some female singer songwriter, and the producer and the engineer were happy enough to let Nick in to ask a few questions to break the tedium. The studio was small and sweaty, but the equipment looked the business. ‘These kids need that many takes, I’m about dying in here,’ the producer moaned. ‘You said you’re looking for Pete Matthews?’