You're Late

You're Late

As cases go, this is a strange one. We've been on it for six weeks now
and have found nothing, that is, we've been told nothing. Then
yesterday afternoon, this phone call comes through to the office:

"Toft," I said.

"Tofty. I've seen you on the telly, mate."

I didn't recognise the voice, but then TV always scores you a whole
load of mates you never knew you had. "Have you now?"

"Yeah," said the voice. This far in I had sketched on a pad the
following, in my own shorthand: mw2530p.drodrp. "Yeah. I think I've got
some information?" Information sounded like inflammation.

"With regard to?"

"With regard to one Jeremy Shockey?"

"Yeah?" I say 'yeah' a lot; I use it like a full stop. And if it's not
'yeah' it's 'okay'. Okay? "Yeah, I'm listening?"

"Can we meet?"

"I'd prefer it if you could give me some idea about what sort of
information it is that you have, yeah?"

"No. We can meet tomorrow. At Papa Joe's on Clement Street. You can buy
me breakfast and I can give you some information."

"Listen, okay? I can't just go out and meet anybody who phones up,
yeah? If you could just give me some idea about what you're going to
say and you might just get you're breakfast, yeah?"

"Ten thirty, no coppers, apart from you of course?"

"I'm not a copper?"

"Ex. And you know what they say, once a copper. Anyway. Ten-thirty and
no coppers and no names. Just me and you and breakfast and
inflammation. Yeah?"

I felt like saying: 'Oi! That's my word'. Instead I said: "Okay. Have
it?" but he was gone.

As cases go this is a strange one. Jeremy Shockey went missing six
weeks ago. Until I know otherwise, he's done a runner. The way I see
it, he's just giving things a miss. See? He's still doing it, because
he's still around somewhere. Dorset? Bermuda? All I want to know about
Jeremy Shockey is why he's still giving things a miss. He's giving his
directorship of the twenty-first largest asset management company a
miss. He's giving his wife a miss and his two grown-up kids a miss.
He's giving his golf club and his gym a miss. You work with what you've
got, so I work on the assumption that Jeremy Shockey isn't doing the
missing, it's everybody else who's gone missing from him. I learnt this
on a course at the Met, before that unsavoury business that we'll
doubtless be forced to confront later.

Anyway, Jeremy Shockey's family, job and leisure activities went
missing. We're on a retainer at XAM so they called us in immediately.
We've had our insolvency guy checking the accounts to make sure that
the currently stationary Jeremy Shockey hasn't stayed where he is with
a large amount of pilfered money while everyone else goes on. But XAM
is still going on with all of its cash and assets and promises. Nobody
knows where they are now, in relation to Jeremy Shockey.

I went on the TV about two weeks ago with the express consent (and this
wasn't in any way easy to acquire) of his firm and his wife and the
City Police.

"At the moment," I said two or so million people, live on the six
o'clock and repeated every half-hour or so through the night on the
rolling news channels, "we just have no idea where Jeremy Shockey is or
why he has disappeared."

The anchor then asked me, "Is it true that his computer hard drives
have been seized by the Met. In relation to child pornography?" This
was true in a manner of speaking. I phoned an old mate at the Met. Who
is now a semi-senior press officer. I told him I was getting nowhere
and that I needed some coverage to try to get someone or something or
anything out of the woodwork. He told me that nobody really cared about
where Jeremy Shockey was unless there was something scandalous about
his disappearance. There then followed some frantic discussions with
his family and the police and the firm and the police. The firm vetoed
the idea of floating out some suspicion of financial irregularity at
the firm. The family vetoed the idea of floating the idea of an affair.
Eventually, we agreed to send his (totally clean) hard-drive to the
Met.'s specialist child porn unit. Within half-an-hour of the courier
leaving the XAM office it was all over the AP and Reuters. It was a
slow news day and we got on about quarter past six. On the BBC it was
'Police are investigating?' on ITV it was 'Suspected child porn fiend?'
So when the anchor asked me about the hard drives, I said:

"No. Jeremy Shockey was a fine upstanding member of the community and
these allegations will be found to be totally unfounded?"

Coverage, anyway, even if I did make it sound all the more likely that
he was a child-porn freak.

Coverage, anyway, brings its own luggage and is often counter
productive. For example: I fielded a phone call from one guy who said
that Shockey's great-grandfather was a first world war general and that
the murder was revenge for the fact that he had a dozen troops shot for
cowardice after they refused to commit suicide for him. Yeah. Okay. So
there's some psychopath running around with an agenda consisting of
ancestral, class and Darwinian vengeance. Yeah, okay. Maybe we're all
running around with those things in mind these days but to bump
somebody off for it? To stoke it up like that? Anyway, this guy was an
old, old man. I wrote in my notes: mw8090sen. Then some woman phoned up
claiming to know where he was and that he was the father of her child.
Was there a child? Did he? Would he? I wrote in my notes:
fb1620drod.

And then this guy yesterday, who has insisted on meeting me, now, in
Papa Joe's. I mean, this place. Right. It's a greasy spoon. It has a
regular clientele like its some kind of local establishment. But it's a
fucking chain. You know it's exactly the same as the Papa Joe's down
the road. There's never been anybody called Papa Joe. More likely the
original proprietor was called Kahn or Singh or some such. You see them
now, though, don't you? You know, yeah, these Indians called Dave or
Mike? So they've looked in the phone book or the book of baby's names
and gone 'Joe's. Papa Joe's.' And then they've taken it to the bank and
the rest is history.

To be honest with you, I wouldn't normally have come out for this sort
of thing. Okay? I've got another dozen things to be doing all of which
would be getting me closer to Jeremy Shockey. Yeah? But we traced this
call from this guy who I'm supposed to be meeting to Brixton so we know
roughly where he is if anything does come out of it. I mean, if we can
get coverage on Jeremy Shockey by feigning child porn allegations, if
we want this guy now, we can get him. That's what you've got to do in
these situations. Look for capital, look for momentum, look for a
foothold, and get your nails in.

I'm drinking what has to be at least a contender for the most soulless
or the least soulful cup of coffee of all time. UHT milk, powdered,
instant. I'm trained to look at everybody in the room but there's
nobody here. A guy sat behind me with a tabloid and a notepad briefly
suggested that he might be the guy who phoned but he looks too
innocuous to be doing anything like this.

So this guy walks in eventually. I don't know it's him at the time but
he walks up to the counter, acknowledges me, orders breakfast number
four and nods at the fat guy toward me when he's asked for the money. I
write in my notes, next to mw2530p.drodrp: 15slbhuk.

I go over and pay and he walks straight past me and sits down.

"Okay," he says. "What do you want?"

The cheek. "You called me, yeah. Remember?"

"So I did. I wanted breakfast and you wanted information. Again," he
said, chugging down a cup of coffee, "what do you want?"

"Listen, yeah. I want to make it clear that this is a very serious
matter, yeah, okay? So I'd rather deal with it professionally, yeah?
You said you had information, yeah? About the missing Jeremy Shockey,
okay?"

"Of course," he said, pouring brown sauce over his pig and egg
breakfast. This guy sounds posh so I write in the notes, next to
everything else, rp/reg. "In a minute."

"I sincerely hope, yeah," I said, "that you're not going to waste my
time, okay."

He had a mouthful of sausage and bacon, through which he said: "Of
course not. Why would I do that?"

"You'd be surprised," I said.

"Okay, yeah," he said. "I know two things about Jeremy Shockey that you
don't. The first is that he's dead. The second is that it's almost
certainly not what you think."

"How do you know this, yeah?" I said. "I mean if what you say is true
it has far reaching, yeah, implications, okay?"

"Of course. But I'm not going to tell you."

"Well, the way it looks now, yeah, is that I'm going to disregard what
you've just said to me, yeah, because, okay, I've got no reason to
believe you."

"Fine," he said and burped in my face.

"Like I said, yeah, I hope you're not wasting my time." I was more
threatening this time, I wanted him to hear me say, 'If you're fucking
me around I'll come and find you and there's no telling what you might
end up doing time for or how many of those teeth of yours I'm going to
liberate. I mean, six weeks on the case and nothing, I'm clutching at
straws so I've got to be wary about not just taking anybody's
shit.

He burped in my face again. He said: "I could use some
cigarettes."

I told him I didn't smoke and he said: "There's a newsagent next
door."

"Look, pal, yeah," I said. "I think we're done here. Unless you can
tell me anything else about all this, yeah, because I don't think you
know what you're talking about. At least, okay, I've got no reason to
believe what you say."

"Okay," he said. "I'll tell you where his body is, yeah, if you buy a
packet of fags."

"Listen, yeah. There's a twenty-thousand pound reward for information
leading to us finding Jeremy Shockey?" This usually brings about a more
favourable tenor, but he interrupted me saying,

"Fuck your reward, mate. Fuck your fags. He's buried in a drain under
the railway arches off Bethnal Green Road. He's out in the channel
after doing a double-pike off Beachy Head. What's it matter? He's being
use to pave the fucking A10. Who cares?"

Christ. We both took deep breaths. The quiet agitation was blown and
now the tics all started up at once: scratching the back of the head;
the drumming fingers on the table; the sniffing. I said: "Listen, yeah.
I'll pop next door and get you some fags, and then we'll talk.
Okay?"

"Yeah," he said.

I got up, leaving my pad and case at the table as a sign of good faith.
He had his head in his hands when I walked out. You know, time was when
I would have just walked away from this lunatic dead-ender. You know,
time was when I would have just melted away and blocked it out. I mean,
there's a dozen and more reasons why people become like this, you know,
all fucked up by grief and loss. Now, today, and recently in general,
I'm more inclined to just roll with it, you know, to play it out. I'm
not going to ever find out while people get like that, I'll never get
to the roots of the tics and the trauma, but I'm not going to run away
from it anymore, that's for sure.

I went into the newsagents and bought the fags but when I returned to
the caf?, he was gone.