Choose Your Parents Wisely (Joe Grabarz Book 2) Read online

  Choose Your Parents Wisely

  tom trott

  Previous books by Tom Trott

  You Can’t Make Old Friends

  Copyright © 2017 Thomas J Trott

  Cover design & illustration by Thomas Walker

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 154511739X

  ISBN-13: 978-1545117392

  for my parents,

  but don’t take it personally

  THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION.

  Names, characters, and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Places are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any incidents, companies, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  prologue

  the most terrifying moment of childhood is when you discover your parents are only human. They are fallible. They make mistakes. The moment is always the same: some minor catastrophe, and they don’t know what to do. Panic simmers beneath the surface. It is terrifying because it’s their job to protect you. But the situation is resolved, somehow. The moment ends.

  Beyond the moment, a greater horror dawns. It used to be reassuring to know that you would grow up. Grow up to be sure of things, like they were. But now you know that maybe you won’t ever grow out of being the terrified, tired, desperate person that you are...

  Sparks crackled from his lighter. He knew the truth was here somewhere, in the darkness. Hidden amongst the broken windows, and the dirt, and the rats.

  He crunched his way through the place, stepping over jagged steel, ducking through collapsed frames, up and down stairs, rusty bolts screaming in agony.

  The feeble orange glow of the lighter gave him a dancing bubble of light, revealing straight steel, curved steel, bolts, glass, the word “DANGER” painted in black; details without context, until he was lost in darkness. But he was not alone.

  In the middle of the void was a steel trapdoor. The chill wind played a tune across it. He tried to wrench it open but it wouldn’t move.

  Fumbling in the swaying light he could see a padlock. He grabbed one of the iron bars that were rusting away on the floor, making sure not to let iron splinters through his gloves, and swung as hard as he could. It pinged off without resistance and flew away into the darkness as though it wanted to give up its secrets. To be absolved of its sins. It was just an innocent padlock, it hadn’t asked to be part of this.

  It took everything he had left to lift the rusted door. The little flame flickered in the air that escaped. Or was it the breeze? Cold night rain was dripping through the obliterated roof, plummeting seven storeys down. All he could see in the flickering glow was bricks, and steel steps leading down into the crypt. His hand was shaking, but he convinced himself it was only the cold, and stepped down into the darkness…

  1

  Tell Me About This Fucking Girl

  mr vogeli had said eight o’clock. He had said eight, and I had waited around till then because he was Swiss and in my warped mind that meant that he might have money. He had definitely said eight o’clock. He couldn’t do any other time, it had to be eight o’clock. I had waited until nine, and then some time after that I fell asleep. Now it was ten o’clock, time to give up and go home.

  I was stuck to the chair. A heatwave had struck the south coast, and Brighton was bearing the brunt of it. This was the hottest year on record, maybe the environmentalists had a point. It was ten o’clock at night and it was too damn hot. When I got home I had an idea to run a cold bath and sleep in it. Or maybe a shower, that way I wouldn’t drown.

  I swivelled round lazily and looked out through the blinds, into the Lanes. They were still bursting with tourists who only wore clothes because they had to, packed tight, like fatty deposits in the city’s arteries. Being the height of summer the sky was still pale blue, and people hadn’t yet been reminded they had to go to work tomorrow. Or maybe they didn’t, what day was it again? Maybe it was Friday actually, in which case I couldn’t blame them. Who could sleep in this heat anyway?

  I could hear small, distant voices from the outer office so I peeled myself off the chair and staggered through the door. It was Thalia, she had dutifully waited too and was watching something on the laptop.

  ‘Are we calling it a day?’ she asked.

  ‘You didn’t need to stay.’

  ‘Neither did you.’

  ‘Except it’s my job.’

  ‘And my job is to assist you. How would you feel if Mr Vogeli arrived and your assistant wasn’t here to greet him?’

  ‘Secretary.’

  ‘That’s not what it says on the stationery.’

  ‘Yeah, but you order the stationery.’

  ‘Of course: I’m your assistant.’

  This argument would keep for tomorrow.

  ‘They still haven’t found her,’ she mused, talking about what she was watching.

  ‘Really?’ I responded automatically, still thinking about Mr Vogeli.

  ‘Is there nothing you can do to help, Joe?’

  ‘Help who?’

  ‘The girl.’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘What do you mean, “what girl?”’ she asked incredulously, ‘Haven’t you been watching the news?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I leave the paper on your desk every day, have you looked at it at all?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a loud knocking on the downstairs door, the one onto the street. More like a loud thumping. Mr Vogeli at last! I opened the door to the landing, the one with the rippled glass that reads ‘J. GRABARZ, No.1 Private Detective’, and called down.

  ‘It’s open!’ I yelled. Then I retreated back into the reception room.

  A worrying number of footsteps thundered up the stairs. His message had suggested it was just him coming, not the entire Swiss Guard.

  ‘I thought the Swiss were known for their punctuality,’ I said loudly enough for him to hear me.

  Then the door opened and four men around my age, or maybe older, marched into the room. They were wearing polo shirts with vomit-inducing combinations of stripes; pink and blue, peppermint and white; you probably could throw up on them and no one would be able to tell.

  They were unmistakably local, with their shorn heads and their gold-effect watches. They had the smell of those pathetic types with the vain fantasy that they’re good at golf. And the even bigger fantasy that if they were good at golf someone somewhere would give a shit.

  Most obviously of all, they were not Mr Vogeli.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ I asked politely.

  The one who seemed to be the ringleader squared up to me, getting incredibly close and trying to make much more of the extra half-an-inch he had on me.

  ‘We’re looking for joy. We’re going to search this place.’

  I was confused, and I looked it too. ‘You’re looking for joy?’

  ‘If she’s not here there’ll be no problem.’

  A woman. Judging by the look of them, I hoped they didn’t find her. ‘You won’t find any Joy here.’

  ‘Sorry if I don’t take your word for it,’ he sneered.

  ‘Somehow I don’t believe you are. Who the fuck is Joy, and, I repeat, who the fuck are you?’

  ‘Joy Tothova, who the fuck else!?’

  ‘Lovely name, what’s it got to do with me?’

  ‘That council bloke on the radio said if everyone just searches the house next door, we’ll be able to find her straight away. That’s what we’re doing.’

  ‘You live next door, really? I thought it was a sweet shop.’

  ‘We work round here.’ Before I could interrupt: ‘Not at the sweet shop.’

  He gave me and the off
ice a thorough examination. ‘You’re the bloke no one knows. Who exactly are you? We hardly see you come in and out, you're here late, and we've no idea what the fuck you do.’

  I looked toward my door, the one that answers those questions. What more was there to do? Still, their ignorance was insulting even in people as stupid as them. I wasn’t famous, I never got stopped in the street, but in a town this size some people at least used to know my name.

  ‘And who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Just good citizens.’

  I took a moment to look at them, one of them was raising his eyebrows at Thalia in a suggestive way. That really pissed me off.

  ‘Get out of my office.’

  They weren’t threatened by me at all. The leader nodded to the others and they jumped on me. I elbowed one of them in the stomach, trying to get free, but they were holding me down. I managed to make enough of a fuss to lose my dignity, but not enough to get free. After less than twenty seconds they relaxed and I jumped back up. It had only taken him that long to search the place. After all, where was there to look?

  ‘She’s not here,’ he barked.

  ‘What a shame,’ I added caustically, ‘you could have been heroes.’

  He looked at Thalia with his best impression of charm. ‘Why do you work for this arsehole, darling?’

  She didn’t say anything, she didn’t react at all.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to his bunch of bastards, and they sauntered out of the room, taking sarcastic glee in carefully closing the door behind them.

  I felt ruffled. And I felt humiliated. And I don’t like either of those feelings. Which meant I had to know what was going on. I glared at Thalia, who was trying not to feel bad for me.

  ‘Tell me about this fucking girl.’

  I had wanted her to give me a brief summary, but apparently she wasn’t going to sit there and explain the damn thing. She dusted off the papers from the bin and told me to read them for once.

  Inside my flat at last, I stripped completely naked and opened both windows. That’s right, both windows, that’s how tragic my life is. I was giving the air the chance to cool me down but it didn’t want to know. It only came inside to find somewhere to die, and sat there going stale like a marsh.

  I seriously considered my shower idea but instead I just laid on the bed sheet. It wasn’t enough but it was all I could manage so I went about reading the rags.

  The headline on Wednesday’s evening edition was ‘GIRL MISSING’, which was at least to the point. There was a photo of her on the front page: white, blonde, smiling, rosy cheeks and freckles. It had been done in a studio, one of those smug-shots that always hang on people’s stairs. Only it wasn’t irritating in this case. She looked like a lovely girl. The caption underneath read “Joy Tothova, missing since this morning”.

  The actual article was a surprisingly scant one for a front page story, and read more like a police report: “Joy Tothova went missing today, in the Fiveways area of Brighton. Eight years old, Joy is around 4ft 1in (124cm), athletic, with long blonde hair. She has blue eyes and freckles. She was wearing a blue t-shirt and black ¾ length leggings with white trainers.”

  And that was it, pretty much. It looked like the paper had picked up a press release just before their deadline. It was odd, disappearances are almost never reported until the next day. I mean, how do you know it’s a disappearance until then? They might just be out late. Not at eight years old, obviously, but still you’d have to work hard to get the police to give a shit before it gets dark. In this case, I couldn’t help being suspicious that the girl wouldn’t be on the front page if she wasn’t so photogenic.

  I folded the paper and aimed it at the bin just beyond my feet. It went in but knocked it over. I would clean it up tomorrow, I was too tired, and I was probably stuck to the bed already.

  The next day the hacks had mobilised. The headline screamed: “FIND OUR BEAUTFUL GIRL” and slightly smaller, “plead parents of missing 8-year-old”. Now they had plenty of pictures, and they ran a profile of the girl over the inside two pages, even before the usual contents and weather and whatever other crap they pad out the adverts with.

  Apparently, Joy was not only a medal-winning school athlete but an A* pupil too. The article interviewed the poor parents, who apparently “struggled through stories of their cherished little girl with an admirably British stiff upper lip”. I checked the byline, that kind of snivelling, faux-Romantic, inappropriately patriotic drivel had to be written by Bill Harker. It was. If there was one person who didn’t give a shit about shoving his tape recorder in your face, it is was Bill Harker. I called him “Hacker”, it seemed appropriate.

  I skipped the rest of his piece, which was the majority of the coverage, only catching the end of it: “with no news of Joy, thoughts naturally turn to uncomfortable nightmare scenarios, such as paedophile sex rings.” Your thoughts, Bill. Your thoughts.

  Hacker was a scaremonger, and it always irritated me that this was how you had to get the news. I tossed the rag near the toppled bin and picked up Thursday’s evening edition. It was the same, so I tossed that too.

  Finally, I picked up today’s morning edition. We didn’t have an evening edition for some reason. Maybe they had sold out; those thugs had bought them all.

  “KIDNAP MUM SLAMS ‘LAZY’ POLICE” it said in big letters, above the same photogenic picture of Joy they had run on Wednesday, and underneath, “mother says plod wasting time in hunt for missing daughter”.

  The story had taken a nasty turn. Joy’s mother, Maria Tothova, claimed “the police are refusing to investigate Joy’s abduction” and instead “insist that she is likely to have run away”. She told of how Joy’s friends’ families had been questioned, their houses searched, rather than questioning “known criminals” and “known paedophiles”.

  The Senior Investigating Officer, one DI Richard Daye, was quoted as saying that “no rock would be left unturned” in the search for Joy, which made her sound worryingly like lost car keys.

  The thing that really upset the parents though, and that Hacker mocked with glee, was Daye’s professional opinion that “there are no signs Joy has been abducted”. How, Bill was keen to ask, could there be no signs? Surely the fact that she was missing was a big one!

  I knew Daye, and had a lot of respect for him; he was all detective. But you can’t be all detective anymore, you have to be part politician. He didn’t play well under scrutiny, on camera, he was much better left alone to do his job, and that was never going to happen. This world was now for the media savvy, not dinosaurs like Daye.

  He should have been a shamus like me, I’m under nobody’s microscope. But no, he was too straight for that. Too decent. He had dedicated himself to police work, made a dent in the evil of the world, and for that they would prise his fingers off the doorframe like they did with all retirees. They ought to give him a medal or something, but they wouldn’t. Maybe I should institute my own: The Joe Grabarz Medal For Lifetime Service; he started good and he ended good. It sounds easy, but how many manage it?

  That was the last of it for now, I couldn’t believe it was enough to whip people up into a frenzy. And who was this councillor encouraging people to search their neighbours’ houses? I bet the police loved him, even more than they loved me. Maybe it was the heat that had done it.

  It was smothering me now, so I peeled myself up off the bed, stood the bin back up, and then threw some water at my face. I patted some more water all over my neck, chest, and back and stood by the window again. The night had finally managed to summon a breeze and I let what little air there was blast chill me. Damn, that felt good, it was the first time I had been cool all day.

  I could hear a low whistling from the flat rooves that my hovel and all the others looked onto. It sounded like a chew toy, but plaintive. A baby seagull. He kept whistling, again and again. It took effort every time and they became cracked and faint. He was calling to his parents, but he didn’t seem to be getting any answer. I cou
ld just about see his silhouette near a chimney. The silhouette never moved, but the whistling carried on.

  I wandered to the other window and looked out onto Preston Circus, to the Fire Station and the cinema. Taxis were still humming along the road, drunk people still stumbling around, wailing sirens drifting from the centre on the hot air. The sky was black now but the city was awash with twinkling lights, from Kemptown to the pier to West Street, Brighton in the summer never closes. The party never ends.

  2

  Professional Curiosity

  the old man’s face slipped away from me. Falling in slow motion. Down into the water. Then under the waves, shimmering, until it faded into the darkness…

  I woke up in a cold sweat. It had been the same dream again. But what concerned me more was how on earth my sweat managed to be cold in this heat. I could feel it behind the blinds, waiting to break in with the new day.

  I pushed myself up off the mattress and stumbled into the shower. I made it as cold as possible, I figured that I could top up on cold now and then maybe it would last me some of the day.

  Once dressed I opened my door and walked down one flight of stairs to the black plastic box where the first person up is obliged to put the post.

  The front page of the weekend edition was a bit different from the last three days: “BUS FARES TO RISE AGAIN”.

  Back upstairs, with avocado toast and orange juice already on the go, I made an espresso in the little one-person macchinetta I had bought from the Open Market. I had recently been converted to making proper coffee at home by having too many posh ones out. After that, anything you make cheaply at home looks and tastes like charcoal.

  Once I had let the sharp, dark nectar, slap me round the mouth a few times, I took my first proper look at the rag. There was nothing on the front about the girl. I guess there was nothing new to print. No scandal yet. Perfect parents, perfect daughter; brilliant for a breaking story, but terrible for follow-up.