10. Jimmy
He called the office for an update. Officially he was on compassionate leave, but working for Section Eight had never been a nine to five thing. An agent like Jimmy Lazenby always had something on the go, and it would be no surprise to anyone that he would call in. The desk-based case-workers were accustomed to getting all kinds of questions from agents and Jimmy had cultivated them carefully over the years, knowing just how invaluable their services were. Any one of them would be keen to help him, even if Douglas Conner hadn’t made sure a few extra resources were attached to this off-the-books investigation.
There had been no more activity from Harriet’s phone – no calls or messages, and the device had not even been switched on since Saturday. The girl had made no appearances on facial recognition systems at stations, malls, airports, or other public areas, and her various online presences had remained mute. That absence in itself was confirmation enough that something was amiss. Nowadays, people didn’t simply vanish. They left digital footmarks from transactions and devices, they showed up on CCTV, they appeared as bit-part players in other people’s digital landscapes. Nowadays, absence was very much a warning sign.
“And the police?”
At the other end of the line, Mamta Patil paused and Jimmy heard the tap of long fingernails on her keyboard. “Are going through the motions, sir,” she told him. “Filed as a missing or absent persons. The senior investigating officer is a detective constable, they’re treating it that seriously.”
That didn’t surprise him. He’d done his research. He knew there were something like 400 people reported missing every day across the UK, and of these around a fifth were girls in their mid to late teens. More than 95 per cent of these girls returned home safely, and if the DC assigned to the case couldn’t find any warning indicators they would do little more than carry out a few perfunctory inquiries at this stage.
The flip side of that was that if they had been able to allocate more than one over-worked junior officer to the case they might have noticed just how thoroughly Harriet Rayner had disappeared, and realized this should be taken more seriously.
“Has the DC seen Harriet’s phone records?”
“He has. He’s interviewed a Glenn Lazenby...” A pause, presumably as the name registered, then: “Flagged for no further action.”
Interesting. So the police had, at least, followed up Harriet’s interaction with Glenn, although they’d seen no cause for alarm in that. No surprise again, though: the police and Section Eight operated to different levels of proof, and while the police were bound by procedures and other constraints, Jimmy had been given full authority to pursue even the flimsiest of leads.
It looked as if this was down to him, for now.
§
Lunchtime at the Flag and Flowers. The same old faces, the same scowl from Sandra behind the bar as she stood there pointlessly polishing a pint glass with the corner of a cloth. The same wood paneling stained dark by nicotine from the decades before pubs had become smoke-free zones. Games machines flashed lights and played random chimes and ditties where they lined up along one wall. The last ten years could easily not have passed.
He passed through a wide archway into the back bar, and there, at the family table right at the gloomy rear, was Glenn. He sat with a guy Jimmy didn’t recognize, but who equally could have filled that seat at any time in the past thirty or more years: broad shoulders, crooked nose, tatts, and a Don’t mess with me look in his eye.
To Glenn’s other side was one of the dancers from last night at Ryders: long legs crossed so she twisted to face Glenn; a little black skirt and vest top; tattoos almost invisible on her dark skin. Her hand rested on Glenn’s arm in that way the girls did at the strip club – the physical contact an encouragement to persuade punters to take them for a private dance. Here, away from the club, it had the same neediness, a simple ever-present touch to remind the man she existed. She looked like a model, or something out of a dream.
Jimmy came to stand at the table, all eyes on him. He fixed his stare on Glenn.
“So what do you know about Mel’s friend?” he said. No preamble, no niceties. His brother knew exactly what Jimmy was talking about.
Glenn held his look for a moment, then shrugged and spread his hands, palms out, as if he had nothing to hide. Then with a brief flick of a finger he dismissed his two companions.
Jimmy sat opposite him and waited.
“Harriet Rayner,” Glenn said. “Seventeen, and a real looker, you know?” Glenn had always known that sleazy grin wound Jimmy up, and had always used it to do just that. “Coke habit, keeps questionable company. Took a shine to me a couple of weeks ago. Understandable, I know. And so now she’s missing it looks bad for me.”
“The police think so.”
A shrug. “I spoke to them, yes. DC Moreton was very sympathetic. He had to ask the question, I know. And now he doesn’t have to. And neither do you. You know when I’m bullshitting, Jimbo. That’s why you’re here.”
He was right, much as Jimmy hated to acknowledge it. Glenn had always been an accomplished liar, but Jimmy knew his tells.
Also, he made a mental note of the fact Glenn clearly knew he was investigating this and didn’t seem surprised. His brother appeared to be making a none-too-subtle point that he’d kept tabs on Jimmy in the intervening years, and knew exactly what he did.
“So where is she?”
“I don’t know. But my guess is she’s doing exactly what her mum has repeatedly done all her miserable life. Disappear for a few days, sleep it off, and then find some way to deal with the embarrassment of having to re-emerge and explain where she’s been. She’s on a friend’s sofa, or shagging dealers for a fix. You know how it goes.”
“She got into your car. Saturday morning. Nothing since.”
“She had a thing for me. Maybe she thought she could screw me and I’d fix her up with a connection, you know?”
“And did you?”
Glenn’s head and neck sunk back into his shoulders, his eyebrows arching – a look that combined disappointment at being asked and a proclamation of innocence.
“I don’t do kids,” he said. “Why would I, when I have all this?”
The stripper was over by the bar, leaning forward with her elbows on the counter to talk with Sandra, a position that emphasized those long legs and drew the eye to the first bulge of ass, just below the skirt. Jimmy knew exactly what Glenn meant when he said ‘all this’.
“You like?” said Glenn now. “I could fix you up, you know. Any of the girls. Pussy’s pussy, after all. Close your eyes and any one of them could be Mel – that’s what I do.”
That smile again. The look in the eye.
Jimmy felt the muscles tightening, and wondered if Glenn knew how close he was to being knocked cold.
Then Glenn raised an eyebrow, paused, and suddenly the two were laughing.
“Bastard,” said Jimmy, a few seconds later.
“As much a bastard as you.”
Jimmy nodded, surprised to have made that connection with his brother after so long – the laughter, the bastard reference that turned thoughts to their father. “We all good for tomorrow?” he asked now.
Glenn nodded. “Looks like a good turn-out,” he said.
“Making sure he’s really gone.”
They laughed again.
This was strange. Nothing had got to him for years. Not really got under his skin. But now, in the space of twenty-four hours, first Mel and now... Jimmy had forgotten the good times. Forgotten being part of this. When you step back it’s so much easier to see things as black or white, but close up...
He’d grown up with Glenn. Seen him cry, seen him scared. Seen him putting on a tough face when the old man had been screaming in his face, often taking the brunt of it to shield his kid brother. The two of them had learned to man up together, to walk the walk, to at least play the part of being the kind of men their father expected of them.
He hadn’t expected to have thoughts like this. The old man’s death had got to him more than he would have believed possible.
Maybe Glenn was feeling the same way. More so, perhaps, because now he had to step into those shoes – no more playing the part.
“You scared her,” said Jimmy. “Last night. That bastard hurt her. Scared the crap out of her.”
Glenn shrugged. “Who? Mel?” he said. “What happened? She okay?”
“You know she is. And you know what happened.”
Glenn looked evasive now, even though he tried not to. He knew.
“I know why you did it,” said Jimmy. “You’re a businessman. You don’t like people digging around in your business. Making waves. I get that. It’s cool.”
He paused, made sure Glenn was actually looking at him, then said, “But if you ever send anyone to scare or hurt Mel again, I’ll break every bone in your body.”
He didn’t shout. Didn’t make a show of aggression. Just spoke softly, evenly. You don’t need show when the person on the receiving end of a threat knows damned well it will be carried out if necessary.
And Glenn knew. He nodded, made that hand-spreading gesture of his again. Nothing to hide.
Jimmy had never done this before, never faced his older brother down. When he’d still been part of the family set-up, he’d mastered the art of deflection and avoidance, even when it meant he found himself drawn ever deeper into the family’s activities.
But he’d learned. If anything proved to him he was a different person now, this was it.
“How long’s it been?” said Glenn now, leaning back in his seat and patting the table with one hand. This seat, the family table. All those times they’d sat here with the old man. Kids with fizzy drinks and crisps, the packets split open lengthways and spread out on the table. Barely understanding what was going on, the conversations and instructions – people’s fates being decided and punishments meted out while they sat here eating their snacks.
And when they were older and understood more. Understood that Uncle Frank’s absence for the past year and sudden reappearance was because he’d been staying somewhere that didn’t allow trips to the pub. Understood that ‘fixing’ someone meant pretty much the opposite, and fixing someone the previous year was why Uncle Frank had been put away.
“Ten years,” said Jimmy.
“Really? That long? Bitch carries it well.”
Again, that muscle twitch, the hair’s breadth between holding back and laying Glenn out cold – and Glenn knew it, was grinning.
Did he know? Had he picked up the signs, guessed what had happened between Jimmy and Mel? Just as Jimmy knew Glenn’s tells, he was sure his older brother could read him, too.
“Ten years,” said Glenn. “I was sitting right here with the old man and Uncle Frank. You remember?”
Of course he remembered.
“Having a few drinks,” Glenn went on. “Celebrating a job well done.”
A ‘job’. A ‘fixing’.
Simon Naismith. A flash young property developer only a year or two older than Glenn. Thought the kind of protection the Lazenby family offered was old-fashioned, said business didn’t have to be like that anymore.
In some ways Naismith had reminded Jimmy of Mel, the way she plunged into the thick of things, carried by a pure belief that the world just couldn’t be that bad. Naismith had simply wanted to get on with his business, buying, developing and selling, wheeling and dealing. Even when Jimmy’s father had leaned on him he hadn’t buckled. He’d even hired extra security – that innocent belief in doing things the right way.
That night, the night Jimmy had walked out of here for good, they’d been on a job. Jimmy, Glenn and Uncle Frank. A ‘quiet word’ with Simon Naismith. ‘Fixing’ the problems he was causing. All these words, these euphemisms that had sailed over the boys’ heads when they were younger and even now made hospitalizing a man and two of his security guys seem somehow like a normal business transaction.
Frank and Glenn had been like madmen in the thick of it, and at one point Jimmy had realized Frank and the old man had planned this between them, cherry-picked a ‘job’ for Jimmy, a blooding to get him more involved in the kind of things Glenn had already been doing for a few years.
“And then your bird walks in,” said Glenn now. “Mel.”
Walked into the Flag and Flowers shortly after they’d got back from the job and seen them, heard them. That adrenaline thing again, the euphoria after the fight. Drinks all round – even then, Glenn with one of the girls from Ryders in his lap.
The surge of feelings Jimmy hadn’t understood at the time, and had taken years to work out: that rush of excitement, the way events still fizzed in your mind, relived and enhanced and, if you’re in a group, talked up and embellished. He’d done plenty of jobs for his father before, of course, but this had been the first time he’d been thrown into something like this, the first time they’d gathered like this afterward. It had marked a new phase, a fuller inclusion in the family business.
He’d been buzzing. Wired. The adrenaline rush swamping all those doubts festering at the back of his mind. The awful guilt at the first blow he’d delivered, the meaty thud of boot in midriff, the cracking of ribs. All that swamped at the time by the need to prove himself, and later by the high spirits of the others, by the look of respect in his father’s eye... Had he ever seen that before?
And then, as Glenn put it, his bird had walked in. Mel.
The look on her face. Not so much the disgust as the acceptance of defeat: that this was who he was, that in the space of this one evening she had lost him to this.
“She starts screaming and shouting at you,” said Glenn. “Telling you you’re better than all this. Better than us. Telling you she can’t take it anymore. Giving you a proper pussy- whipping.” Glenn laughed, seemed to find it all amusing, but that might simply have been for effect.
Was that how it had been?
It’s not how Jimmy painted it in his head, how events went whenever he replayed them.
She hadn’t screamed and ranted. Hadn’t delivered any ultimatums.
It had been unspoken. In her look. In the slump of her body.
She’d seen him as he was, as he was becoming, and that only served to emphasize his own... disgust? Fear?
Not physical fear. He could handle himself, even then. No, a deeper fear than that. A sense of control lost, of being drawn ever deeper.
He’d clutched at that glimmer of realization like a lifeline. Gasped for air.
Walked out.
Not forever. Not then.
At first it was that he simply couldn’t face Mel. Not when she looked at him like that. And not when he still felt the visceral thrill of what he’d done.
It was only later. After he’d walked. After he’d had time to gather his thoughts, work out what had happened. Only then that he’d realized he’d already crossed a line, already walked, and could not go back until he was something other than what he was becoming.
“All this,” said Glenn. He’d been talking, but Jimmy had filtered him out. “Don’t you miss it? We could have been something, couldn’t we? You and me, bro’. You could have had yourself some of this.”
He could. Maybe he should.
“It’s not too late. Not for family. Not for you and me, Jimbo.”
Jimmy shook his head. He knew Glenn was toying with him. That familiar thing with him: you never knew quite where you stood, whether he was being serious or winding you up.
For a moment, though, he allowed his brain to play through the fantasy, to imagine never having to walk into those anonymous offices on the South Bank ever again, never having to spend three hours in a meeting that didn’t officially exist to review a mission that had never officially taken place to make sure he’d followed all the rules that had never been written.
To imagine the simplicity of living this life, of being an old-school bastard like Glenn, and their father before them. A villain with principles, if that could ever, really, be a thing.
Was that even so far from what he was?
“Fuck off, Glenn,” he finally said, and his brother laughed.
Then Glenn leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees. “What if you’re wrong, Jimbo?” he said. “What if I’m just doing my best here? Mel comes to me, needs help, so I try to help her. What’s so strange in that? She asks me to sniff around after her little girlfriend, so that’s what I do. You and me, we’re cut from the same cloth. We just have different ways of asking, right?”
“So you’re just being nice?”
The shrug, the spreading of hands. “What can I say? I was brought up good.”
“And last night?”
“What if you’re wrong about that too? Do you really think I’d send someone after Mel? What are you missing, Jimbo? What hasn’t Doug Conner told you, eh?”
Jimmy didn’t react. Glenn never had grasped subtlety, and now he was telling Jimmy not only that he knew he was involved in law enforcement, but that he worked for Mel’s father. That was a serious level of inside information.
“Maybe you should ask him why he might send his daughter here, playing the innocent with her questions, stirring things up. Don’t tell me you haven’t wondered about that?”
Glenn sat back. Job done. That irritating smile teasing at his features. A glance across to the bar was all it took to tell his dancer friend to bring her long legs back over to the family table and join them. To sit in that way of hers, legs crossed so her body twisted toward him attentively, one needy hand on his arm.
“Remember,” he said. “You’ll always have a welcome here. We’re family, right?”
§
Outside, the sun was bright, painting the street in extremes of light and shade.
Jimmy’s head spun, raced.
He was surprised Glenn knew so much, but perhaps shouldn’t have been. Jimmy had kept tabs on Glenn and their father over the years, after all. Partly that family thing, the connection, a sense of wanting to know what they were up to even if he didn’t want anything to do with them. And partly a pragmatic thing, wanting to be sure he’d never be wrong-footed by either of them.
It made sense Glenn would do the same.
But to know he worked for Conner? And, by implication, to at least have some idea that the kind of work they did didn’t fit the remit of any of the normal agencies – the police, MI5, MI6...
The suggestion Conner had actually sent Mel here was ludicrous, though. He would never use her in that way. There was no sense to it.
And even as Jimmy convinced himself there was no rationale there, a part of his mind constructed a narrative where Conner had perhaps fed Mel a few snippets, knowing she would dive in and stir things up with the Lazenby family. A narrative where, when he realized she’d dug deeper than he’d expected, he might have sent Jimmy in to protect her. Perhaps even a scenario where, when Jimmy didn’t extract her immediately, Conner might have sent in someone to track Mel down on a dark night and scare her into getting the hell out. To...
He stopped himself.
Remembered that little smile playing on Glenn’s features as Jimmy had got up to leave.
You know when I’m bullshitting, Jimbo. That’s why you’re here.
He always had. He’d always known Glenn’s tells.
But did he still have that ability?
Ten years was a long time.
And now, as his head raced and jumped from one possibility to another, the one thing he knew for sure was that Glenn had always liked to toy with him, and he always would.
With Glenn it had never been a question of whether he was telling the truth or not, it was all about the spectrum in between.