The Loop Read online

  ‘I know,’ he said quietly, ‘and I’m sorry, but I don’t want to marry your mother, still less your father.’

  ‘I need to know, first.’

  ‘Are you sure you mean that?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ I said snappily, because I wasn’t.

  ‘If that’s what you want. Just don’t make it a shroud of Laertes job.’

  I didn’t know what that meant, but I didn’t let on. I gave the sort of reference-recognition smile that I thought would cover it, and responded to the obvious sense. ‘I’ll make it quick. When I’ve finished with Jacob. Can we talk about it again then?’

  ‘OK.’ He stretched out his hand, took mine and squeezed it. I like his touch. It’s strong and familiar and exciting, and comforting too. It isn’t the touch of the young Robert Mitchum, but then again, now, neither is Robert Mitchum’s. And Barty wouldn’t tell me about his high school English teacher.

  I owed him something, and I wanted to give something, but I didn’t know what. Honesty? ‘Barty, I’m afraid. I don’t want things to change. I don’t want us to change. I don’t want the future to have arrived, and the door to shut behind us.’

  He was still holding my hand, and he spoke gently. ‘Honey, if you don’t want to change, I’ve bad news. You were born in the wrong species on the wrong planet. Here on Earth, things change, all the time. But sometimes it’s for the better. And sometimes doors shut to keep bad things out.’

  I nodded. He could work that lot up into a post-trauma counselling session, no problem.

  He gave my hand a last squeeze, and let it go. ‘What do you want to do today, joy of my life?’ he said.

  ‘Get a plane home. I don’t want to wait till tomorrow. There’s a hotel in Bayswater I want to visit. And oh, Barty – the loop.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘What could it mean?’

  ‘The area just north of here?’

  ‘Apart from that.’

  ‘Hangman’s noose. Loop the loop, in an aeroplane. Loopy-crazy. Mispronouncing the French for wolf. A nickname from the Spanish name, Lupe. A dubbing loop, for sound. The inner circle of a decision-making process – a president. Bush I think, said he was “outside the loop”. You really should give me a context.’

  ‘Something Jacob said to Jams. “The real me is in the loop.” ’

  ‘He could feel he’s being throttled by something. His childhood, perhaps?’

  ‘You think it’s metaphorical.’

  ‘Just guessing,’ he said.

  Thursday, 31 March

  Chapter Nine

  The taxi from Heathrow dropped me at my flat just after ten. I waved Barty off and stood on the pavement, glad to be home. It was a beautiful London morning: cool, clear, sunny. Very good weather, this spring. Global warming?

  I could hear the hum of the computer as soon as I opened the door of my first-floor maisonette, which meant my assistant Nick was there. Good. I’d called the day before to see if she’d be free: she wasn’t always, because she wasn’t always my assistant either. Officially, she’s a student at a local college, coming up for her A level examinations, due to go to medical school in September. I’d taken her on for work experience a while back because my ex-social worker, who was also hers, asked me to. Nick was sleeping on the streets at the time and because she wasn’t eighteen yet she was officially in care.

  She’s still sleeping on the streets when she isn’t crashing with Grace Macarthy. No way am I going to let her stay at my place. But she helps me out when she doesn’t have to turn up at college (which is most of the time, because she’s very bright) and when she isn’t working with a very old, half-batty, half-brilliant Oxford mathematician she’d met on one of my cases. I even pay her, sometimes, because she’s useful.

  Particularly for the ‘missing kid’ side of the business. More children than you’d believe go missing, all the time. Most of them because they can’t stand it at home. And many of them come to the London streets, where Nick swims like an unthreatened fish. And many of the kids’ parents, driven by guilt or anger or maybe just love, want to find them, and are prepared to pay.

  Nick handles all that, now. It’ll be a dent in my income when she leaves.

  I also can’t do without her at present because I’ve just installed a new PC, on her advice, and until I get the hang of e-mail and the Internet, she’ll stay on the payroll.

  She didn’t leave the computer when I came into the room. She hardly even looked up.‘Hi,’ she said.‘This is the last of the invoices. Coffee just made, in the kitchen.’

  ‘Hi, Nick. All well?’

  She didn’t answer. With most people, she’s an elective mute, and even with me she doesn’t produce conventional small-talk responses. A restful quality in an assistant.

  I took a mug of coffee and looked over her shoulder at the reassuringly high figures in the invoice on the screen. My business is doing well. If I married Barty, who’s a good earner himself and who also has (by my estimate) a solid chunk of capital, I’d be better off still. And my children would have a good start.

  And, to be fair to Barty, I’d have to treat the search for my father as just another case: handle it quickly, in other words. Start handling it now.

  The obvious place to start was with my ex-social worker, who’d dealt with me since I was four. I reached for the telephone.

  No luck at her office. I tried her mobile.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Mary? This is Alex Tanner.’

  Nick shied away from me like a nervous horse and started making ‘I’m not here’ gestures. I made ‘nothing-to-do-with-you’ faces back, and she calmed down.

  ‘Alex! How nice to hear from you! Is this about Nick?’ said Mary warmly. She says everything warmly, it’s her job.

  ‘No. Nick’s fine, as far as I know.’ Nick gave me a ‘thumbs-up’, sat back down at the PC, and set the printer running. ‘It’s about me. I’m thinking of getting married.’

  Nick was now miming ‘Are you mad?’ She’s gay, and she has a very low opinion of men, mostly because her mother was a prostitute and partly because she’s met some crap men.

  I ignored her Mary was congratulating me supportively and professionally, though she’s not mad on men either. Her male lover left her for a male probation officer. I let Mary run for a while, then interrupted. ‘Yeah, thanks, but the thing is, I want to find my father.’

  Mary rambled on about it being an important decision, about the need for counselling, about an understanding colleague who was well qualified in this very area, though with the cutbacks in Government funding—

  ‘Sure, Mary. I don’t want counselling, though. I want facts. Do you know who he is? My mother said he was a taxi-driver she met in a pub. Is that true?’

  More rambling. Nick was now folding the invoices and stuffing them into envelopes, without looking at me.

  ‘So you don’t? My mother never told you?’

  Supportive ramble.

  ‘I know she was off her head. But that was only most of the time. In the windows of sanity, did she never say?’

  Ramble.

  ‘So you have no idea?’

  Silence. Then – ‘No. Sorry, Alex. No idea.’

  I rang off.

  Nick said, ‘Anything you want processed, now I’m on the machine?’

  I pointed to my carry-on holdall. ‘Type up the notes in the blue folder, labelled “Drugs doc”.’

  She rifled through the holdall, pulled out the folder. A plastic bag came with it and spilled its contents on the carpet. My freebie plunder. She looked at it, then at me. ‘Can I?’ she said.

  She’d taken to doing this when I came back from trips abroad. I nodded. She spread it out and looked at the little packages. ‘Toothbrush and toothpaste?’

  ‘Airline.’

  ‘Slippers?’

  ‘Airline.’

  ‘Soap? Shower gel?’

  ‘Hotel.’

  ‘Salt and pepper and sugar?’

 
; ‘Eateries.’

  She stirred the gleaming little pile with her finger, and then I tumbled to something I should have done five trips ago. ‘It’s for you,’ I said.

  ‘D’you mean it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She gathered them up, put them back in the plastic bag, put the bag in her carrier ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said, feeling the ground shift under my feet. In a second I’d gone from being the little girl who has to steal her own treats because she’s underparented, to the adult who consoles the left-behind child by collecting tiny tokens of affection as they roam the world.

  At present, I didn’t like it. I’d better get used to it, I thought, looking yearningly at the empty carpet where my small reassurances had been. Grow up, Alex. It’s time.

  So I went to have a bath. Back to the womb. Really grown up.

  When I came back down to the living-room, Nick had gone, probably to take the invoices to the post.

  It was eleven o’clock: plenty of the working day left. I’d slept on the plane and, for the moment, was raring to go.

  I listened to the messages on the answering machine. Some upcoming work, which I noted.

  Polly burbling on about arriving on Friday and looking forward to seeing me. As usual, she talked for too long and was cut off in mid-sentence, but I noted her flight arrival time. If I could, I’d meet her at Heathrow: I was using her car and had been for the last few months, so it was the least I could do.

  Alan Protheroe, who I’d rung from Chicago and left a message for the day before, fussing about why I was coming back one day early and what was wrong and he hoped I wasn’t expecting to be paid for the full three days and would I get in touch, please, immediately.

  Alan always fusses. I’d ring him tomorrow.

  His was the last message.

  Still no sign of Nick.

  I took a half-mug of lukewarm coffee and sat back down at the phone. I owed it to Barty to keep pressing on for my father, although I didn’t want to, I increasingly realized. I really didn’t want to know. I hadn’t wanted to know for my whole lifetime, otherwise I’d have pursued it with my mother before she finally retreated into the limbo of advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

  Why didn’t I want to know? Why hadn’t I thought about it? I’m curious by nature and as much of a navel-gazer as the next sucker who always does ‘know-yourself’ quizzes in trash magazines.

  I sipped the coffee and tried to face the fact that I didn’t even want to know why I didn’t want to know. Just thinking about it made me feel empty and insubstantial and ill.

  Jet-lag, I said to myself firmly, and picked up the phone.

  I got lucky on my third number. ‘Eddy? Alex Tanner. How’s my favourite policeman?’

  ‘Your only policeman, you mean,’ said Eddy. His voice, like him, was simultaneously genial and faintly threatening. He’s a successful detective of the old school, a thief-taker, and an even more successful ladies’ man. He’s a superintendent in the Metropolitan Police, and though he’s very able he’ll never rise any higher because his idea of community relations is to bang up males and bang females. He’s an old family friend and the father of my first serious boyfriend and I use him unmercifully.

  ‘What can I do you for?’ he said. ‘I presume this isn’t a social call, and if it is I’m too busy, so sod off.’

  ‘Eddy, do you know who my father is?’

  Silence. Then, cautiously: ‘Why are you asking?’

  Silence my end. I’d had an astonishing thought. ‘Eddy, should I call you Dad?’ He’s always spoilt me, but I’d assumed that was just because he liked kids and we got on. But maybe—

  ‘Put that idea right out of your mind, girl. Right out. Me and your mum were close, yeah, but that was after you were born. Well after. Otherwise there’s no way I’d have let you go out with young Peter. Or made passes at you.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘So, can you help me out on this?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Why don’t you want to tell me?’

  ‘I’ve got to think.’

  ‘You? Think?’

  ‘You free around noon tomorrow?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Meet me in the Churchill for a bevvy, we’ll talk about it,’ he said, and rang off.

  It wasn’t like him to be delicate, or discreet. What was he playing at? Maybe my father was a serial killer. Or the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

  And I had to wait until tomorrow to find out.

  My heart was already doing flip-flops from the second or so when I’d guessed I was Eddy’s child. I’m not enjoying this, I thought.

  Key in the lock. Nick was back. ‘I’ve posted the invoices,’ she said, then looked at me closely. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Jet-lag,’ I said. ‘Forget it. We’re off out on a new case. A misper, your favourite. I’ll tell you about it in the car.’

  Chapter Ten

  The Saxe-Coburg Hotel, Jacob’s last address, was in Bayswater, just west of Queensway, about ten minutes drive from my flat. It spread along three socking great stucco-fronted Victorian terraced houses. It was lower range, package-tour country. I found a meter fifty yards away, fed it ludicrous sums of money – parking in London is beyond a joke – and set off for the hotel, threading my way through the piles of luggage and swarms of middle-aged tourists in sensible walking shoes that had just been deposited by a huge air-conditioned German coach.

  I was nearly there before I realized that Nick, who I’d told to stay in the car, was beside me.

  I stopped. ‘What’s this, Nick?’

  ‘I want to come with you.’

  ‘Why?’

  She shrugged, expressionless. She’s nearly always expressionless. She’s half-Asian and about twice as inscrutable as most whole Asians I’ve known. She’s almost as inscrutable as Barty, when he wants to be.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Get your cap from the car.’ The top of her scalp is bare in patches, where she’s pulled her hair out. If she wears a baseball cap the patches don’t show, and she doesn’t frighten the punters.

  I waited. When she came back presentable, she said, ‘You went away to America.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I missed you.’

  Sometimes she regresses. I ignore it. ‘OK, let’s get in before the tourists. Just don’t speak, all right?’

  She nodded, scornfully.

  Inside, the hotel was cleanish, uglyish and anonymous. Unless Jacob had really distinguished himself, by doing a runner without paying his bill or assaulting a maid, I didn’t expect anyone to remember him.

  I was pleased to see someone was manning the Enquiries desk while three girls dealt with the long queue at check-in, otherwise we’d have been there all night, and even more pleased when I saw what he was like. He was probably in his early thirties but he looked fifty and a drinker. He had a puffy face, red eyes, a too-loose, too-blue suit and grubby hands. A plaque on the desk told me he was James O’Reilly, Assistant Manager.

  A direct approach. ‘Good morning, Mr O’Reilly. I’m a private investigator,’ I said. ‘Here’s my credentials.’ I gave him a business card and twenty quid.

  He gave them straight back. ‘Are you serious?’ he said in a sharp East End voice.

  ‘Perfectly serious,’ I said, and added another twenty.

  The money vanished, the card remained on his desk. ‘Well, Alex Tanner, what you want?’

  ‘I was told a man called Jacob Stone stayed here September last year. Can you check that for me?’

  He clicked away at the keyboard beside him, looked at the result on the screen, and nodded.

  ‘Yup,’ he said.

  ‘Yup what?’

  ‘Yup, he stayed here.’

  I walked round behind the desk and looked at the display on the monitor. It was the seating plan for a dental hygienists’ convention dinner to be held next month.

  ‘Give me my credentials back,’ I sai
d. ‘Or show me something useful.’

  ‘Nasty suspicious mind you’ve got,’ he said, not offended, not even irritated.

  ‘It’s a requirement in my line of work.’

  ‘What date in September are we talking?’

  ‘After the twenty-fifth.’

  ‘I’ll have to go through day by day.’

  ‘So start.’

  He started while I watched. Nick propped herself against a would-be decorative pillar and tried to keep her hands from drifting up to tug at her hair. She’d obviously been much more stressed than I realized by my very short trip, or maybe it was the prospect of my marriage, I suddenly thought, because I’d worked away before since I’d known her and for longer periods too. I smiled at her and she turned her head away.

  ‘Here you are. Jacob Stone. Stayed for three days, September 27th to 30th. Paid in cash.’

  I looked at Jacob’s receipted bill glowing away on the screen. He’d been there, he’d stayed. He hadn’t used room service or the telephone – damn, because I’d have got the numbers – he’d paid, he’d left. According to Carl, he hadn’t been there when Carl had looked, the second day of his stay and he hadn’t responded to messages Carl had left. He just might not have wanted to, of course. Maybe he was too busy with something else.

  What?

  That was a speculation for later.

  ‘Did he leave a forwarding address?’

  O’Reilly just laughed.

  ‘The hotel wouldn’t have kept it?’

  He laughed again.

  ‘What address did he put in the register?’

  ‘That’s a legal document. You can’t look at that.’

  ‘But you can.’

  I expected him to ask for more money, but he just shrugged and went through a door at the side of the reception area. I looked at Nick but she looked away.

  O’Reilly came back with a slip of paper Ormskirk Drive, Armthorpe, Doncaster. Stone’s home address from Oxford days.

  The next stop.

  * * * * *

  Back in the car, I entered O’Reilly’s bribe in my expenses for Jams.