Candleland Read online

  “Over ten years ago now,” he said. “My wife and son have been dead that long. Killed by someone looking for me. Because he thought I’d destroyed his life. And then a couple of years ago, I lost someone else. Someone equally close.”

  He fell silent. Faye moved along the sofa towards him. He felt her arm snake towards his thigh, smelt her clean, fresh skin.

  “When you lose someone suddenly you always blame yourself,” she said, her breath whispering close to Larkin’s ear. “I know I did. But you can’t, you have to go on.”

  “Yeah,” said Larkin. He moved his arm around her.

  “When Jeavon died …” She sighed. “God, I missed him. I still do. Because it was sudden like that, the car crash, it’s like … like you were talking to someone, telling them something important … and now … you’ll never finish the sentence. Never speak to them again.” She sighed once more, moved in closer.

  Despite, or maybe because of, the subject of conversation he found the closeness of Faye’s body giving him an erection. He didn’t know whether to hold her tighter or move away, so he stayed where he was.

  “It’s the intimacy I miss,” she said. “Knowing everything about someone mentally, spiritually and physically … you never find that again.”

  Her head now rested on Larkin’s shoulder. It suddenly dawned on him that her gin, like her spliff, was only the latest of many for the evening. He wondered if this was how she passed most evenings. He stayed where he was, listening while she talked.

  “It gets so lonely …” she continued. “Sometimes … sometimes some student that lodges here … I let him into my bedroom. And he holds me, and I hold him and he makes me feel wanted … but they’re only boys … they don’t last …” Both her arms were round Larkin now. Her lips were resting on his neck. “You know what I mean …” she said in a dreamy voice, “don’t you?”

  Larkin knew. He’d been to that place before, many times. Like Faye he was there now.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice dry, “I know.”

  “Then come to bed with me.” Her voice was a desperate whisper, aching, imploring. “Now.”

  “OK,” said Larkin.

  They both stood up. With a shy smile, Faye took his hand and led him from the room, up the stairs to her bedroom. Larkin paused on the landing. The only sound in the dark old house was Moir’s booze-tranquillised snoring, the only light that which had seeped in from streetlights outside. He looked into the room where Faye was taking off her robe, her naked body silhouetted, backlit against the curtains. She looked beautiful. It was too dark to see the damage, the vulnerability, but he knew it was there. It just added to her appeal.

  He went inside and closed the door behind him, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  Behind the Cross

  The boy had big, round, eyes; trusting, cow-like. His hair was a straight blonde mop and he was wearing a T-shirt. He could have been any kid, anybody’s kid. Above him were two other pictures, one of a woman: dark hair and glinting eyes, wide mouth. Built for fun, she looked like trouble. Next to her was a young man, blonde, with an unintelligent, bovine face but cunning eyes. Above the pictures, a message:

  HAVE YOU SEEN THESE PEOPLE?

  CASH REWARD FOR RETURN OF MY SON.

  Underneath were two phone numbers, a land line and a mobile. More imploring words but no extra details. Leaving it to the reader to fill in the story, sketch the heartbreak. The posters covered every bit of available space along Pentonville Road and Caledonian Road, stuck on abandoned shops, boarded-up windows and overslapped on the usual posters for bands, CDs and raves.

  Larkin was the only one on the pavement looking at the poster, everyone else was ignoring it, their own lives taking precedence. How easy it is, he thought, not for the first time, to slip wilfully through the cracks.

  King’s Cross was the same as it had always been, only more so. The odd, surprising pockets of gentrifying Islington trickle-over and attempts at hipness – E-ed up all-night danceathon clubs in barely converted warehouses – were desperate and superficially cosmetic. It was still a place where lives dead-ended; the dispossessed’s last port of call before they dropped off the screen altogether. The routes were clear and the facts now acknowledged – there were even sharps bins in the public toilets.

  Larkin moved away from the poster and checked the piece of paper in his hand. The address he was looking for was down the Caledonian Road. As he walked he thought of the night before.

  Sex with Faye had been, on a purely physical level, a wonderful experience. As he shut the bedroom door and turned to face her, she came over, put her arms around him, head on his shoulder.

  “Damaged people make the best lovers,” she had whispered. “They expect nothing and give everything. When two get together, it can be … electric …”

  And it had been. Inhibitions shredded by blow and booze, psychological needs transformed into physical wanting. So what if they thought of other people, said past partners’ names with their minds’ voices? It didn’t matter. They were there for each other, in the here and now. That was the thing.

  Afterwards they had lain in each other’s arms, unmoving, unspeaking. Eyes not connecting. Touching not each other’s bodies but those of the missing, the lost. No future together; the commonality that had brought them close would be the thing to stop them going further. Larkin had drifted off to sleep and when he had woken, he was alone.

  He had gone downstairs to find Moir at the kitchen table, hands shaking their way through a breakfast fag. After exchanging tentative pleasantries, Larkin asked where Faye was.

  “Out. Work.” Moir replied his voice as trembling as his hands.

  Larkin nodded. There was no sign of Andy. Larkin hadn’t expected there to be. “Just you and me then, Henry,” said Larkin.

  “Look,” said Moir, “d’you mind if I just stay here today? Just till I …”

  Larkin looked at his friend, sitting there in an old T-shirt and shorts. All the fight seemed to have gone out him. All the life. “No,” said Larkin, “that’s OK. I’ll go.”

  Moir nodded, relieved. He said nothing more, so Larkin finished up and left the house.

  The first place Larkin would go was the agency Moir had employed to look for Karen. A private agency based on the Caledonian Road. Although he wasn’t expecting any instant results, it seemed as good a place to start from as any.

  Larkin walked down the filthy street, pulling his coat around him to keep out the cold and exhaust fumes, and stopped in front of a doorway set between an off-licence and a boarded-up store front. A piece of card tacked to a bell said Finders. He had the right place. He decided not to ring and set about climbing the bare, broken wooden staircase.

  He reached the top. Two doors stood in front of him; one, battered and chipped, had a laminated cardboard sign pinned to it bearing the same name as the downstairs bell. Larkin knocked and waited.

  “Come in,” called a fag-addled voice.

  Larkin entered. The room was quite small and made smaller by the clutter. Shelves covered the walls, piled with box files, papers and text books. An old two-bar electric fire in the corner threw out heat to a six-inch radius. The skeletons of two chairs sat on a threadbare rug in front of a weathered mahogany desk. On the desk was another pile of papers, an Arsenal mug and a packet of Rothmans. Also on the desk was the room’s only incongruity: a top-of-the-range PC and printer. The whole office spoke of cramped efficiency; too much work for too small a space. Behind the desk sat a middle-aged woman, grey-streaked, pudding basin haircut, glasses and a nondescript beige top. She held a pen in her right hand, a cigarette in her left. Karen Carpenter was abruptly silenced as she clicked off Melody FM on a portable.

  “Morning,” said Larkin. “I called earlier …”

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said, putting the pen down and sticking the fag in her mouth, “Mr …” She consulted a desk diary, well-thumbed for only February. “Larkin. Have a seat.”

  Larki
n took his chances on one of the chairs and looked at her. She reminded him of someone but he couldn’t think who.

  “Mo Mowlam,” she said, as if reading his mind.

  “Sorry?”

  “I saw the look you gave me. I remind you of someone but you don’t know who. Mo Mowlam. Everyone says so.” She smiled. “Shame it couldn’t’ve been Sharon bloody Stone, but there you go.” She had the kind of music hall Cockney accent that seemed about to burst into song.

  Larkin smiled. It sounded like a standard line she trotted out to clients or potential clients, but it was a good technique, like a considerate dentist putting patients at ease. Any levity, any humanity, was welcome. Larkin found himself warming to her already.

  “Anyway, my real name’s Jackie Fairley and when I’m not sorting out Northern Ireland I run this place. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, as I said on the phone,” began Larkin, “I’m here on behalf of Henry Moir. He was a client of yours.”

  She clicked a few keys on the keyboard and looked at the computer screen. “That’s right. He wanted us to find his daughter.”

  “Yeah,” said Larkin. “He sent me to pick up your findings and settle up with you.”

  Jackie Fairley nodded. It was a professional nod, giving nothing away. She pressed a button and the printer whirred into life. She passed the A4 sheets to Larkin.

  “There you are,” she said, “Karen Moir.”

  Larkin gave the pages a cursory once-over. “Anything here that I should go to first?”

  “You mean have we found her?” She gave a small, sad smile. “No. Perhaps we would have done, given more time and money, but ’fraid not.”

  Larkin put the pages on his lap. “Thanks.” Looking round the office he found he was curious. “How do you find a missing person? Presumably they’re missing because they don’t want to be found.”

  “Usually, yes,” She drew deep on the Rothmans. “But not always. There’s various routes. Most people looking for a misper – official slang, you can guess what it means – they start with the National Missing Persons Helpline. They’re the ones who do the posters and have the appeals on TV. They also do detective work, counselling, checking records, the lot. They’re bloody good, the best. We work with them from time to time, and vice versa. They know the routes to follow. There’s also the Salvation Army, the National Missing Persons Bureau at Scotland Yard – although that mainly matches data on mispers with unidentified bodies the police have come across – those are the main ones. If they get no joy from any of them, people come to us. Or someone like us.”

  “And then?”

  “We talk to the people looking for the misper. Find out what they know. Try and find out what the misper is running away from. Sometimes they can’t cope, sometimes they think they’re unloved. Often they’re running from some form of authority figure, parents, step-parents, children’s home, whatever. If we find the runner and there’s, say, a history of abuse, then we organise counselling and don’t return them.” She gave a small laugh. “We draft in extra strongarm operatives for the days when we have to give that news to people. If the people doing the looking are genuinely concerned, we do all we can to reunite them.” She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes. “Most of the kids on the street are just out of institutions and spiralling down.” She stubbed her fag out. “We get the lucky ones. The ones with someone at home, waiting for them.”

  Larkin nodded. “Interesting you said authority figure.”

  Jackie Fairley smiled grimly, looked at the screen. “I see Mr Moir is a detective. Policemen are all the same. He might be in plain clothes but he still wears the uniform on the inside. A fair few runaways have police as parents. It’s not unconnected.”

  Larkin opened his mouth to speak.

  “Now before you start,” she said, a teasing smile on her face, “I was speaking generally. I had fifteen years in the force, so I should know.” She leaned back, lit up another fag. “So Mr Larkin, why didn’t Mr Moir go to his own to find his girl?”

  “I don’t think he wanted them involved. He didn’t want them to see –” His pain, thought Larkin.

  Jackie Fairley nodded. She seemed to finish the thought too. “I see. I know what the force can be like. I had enough of it.”

  “How d’you end up here, then?”

  “This used to be my manor, the Cross. I used to work with runaway kids. All this here,” – she gestured round the office – “is just an extension of that.”

  Larkin looked again at the papers on his lap. “I’ll be having a go at looking for her myself.” She gave him an amused, ironic look. “Anything I should follow up first?”

  “Just read the report. It’s all in there.”

  “Would you have told me if you’d found her?”

  Jackie Fairley gave her grim smile again. “Just remember what I said. Sometimes mispers don’t want to be found, in which case we find out why and arrange for help. Sometimes they’re already in a safe house or refuge, in which case we tell the parents we’ve found them but don’t say where. We don’t break confidentiality. And lastly,” she paused, took a drag. “We don’t find them. And that could be for any number of reasons.”

  Larkin nodded, letting the unacknowledged word hang in the air between them. There was silence in the room, save for the traffic outside and the sound of Jackie Fairley sucking smoke down into her lungs, burning the paper wrapping on the cigarette as she did.

  Larkin thanked her and took out his chequebook to settle up. That done, he stood up and made for the door.

  “Oh, if you don’t mind me asking,” Jackie Fairley said, after depositing the cheque in a locked safe, “what’s your job? How come you’re involved in this?”

  “I’m a friend of Henry’s,” he replied. “And a journalist.”

  “Ooh,” she said, suddenly interested “D’you want to do a story about me, then?” She laughed.

  Larkin smiled. “I can think of worse ones. You do good work here.”

  “Yeah,” she said, crossing to the window, looking down. “We do what we can.” She turned back to him. “Let me know how you get on. If you’re successful at it, I might have a job for you.”

  He smiled, shook her hand and left. As he walked down the stairs he heard the radio being switched back on; the comforting, soothing, escapist sounds of Andy Williams singing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” being totally at odds with their surroundings.

  Outside on the street, he headed towards King’s Cross. He walked, eyes front, ignoring the posters like the other pedestrians. He had to find a comfortable, stimulating environment in which to read the report. That meant a pub. But not one round here.

  Larkin turned right on to Pentonville Road, the urban cocktail stink of human piss, bad garbage and carbon monoxide stinging his nostrils as he headed for the station. He didn’t look back, didn’t speculate on the whereabouts of the missing poster boy, told himself he had enough to think about, told himself he couldn’t feel those wide, innocent, monochrome eyes bore into his back.

  Spice of Life

  The man, Arabic, Lebanese or something, was poorly dressed, overweight and dead-eyed. But he fed the machine in the corner of the cafe, hands moving over the buttons, eyes interpreting the lights and bleeps, with the solemn, dextrous skill and laser-locked attention of a Jedi master. Larkin, sitting at a nearby table, was supposed to be keeping watch through the window, but his gaze was involuntarily drawn to the man. Eventually, money consumed and none regurgitated, the man rolled out of the cafe and Larkin continued his vigil.

  Nineteen years old, dark brown hair (now possibly dyed), last seen wearing black jeans, boots, an old grey sweatshirt and a blue denim jacket. A useless description. Also a photo, swiped by Moir from one of Karen’s druggie buddies in Edinburgh: a teenager, sullen, with short hair, pouting mouth and dark-ringed eyes. A look, simultaneously brooding and haunted.

  Larkin had gone to The Spice of Life, an old West End pub on the fringes of Soho, to read the r
eport. All around him the lunchtime crowd were meeting, finding people, while he sat alone, searching, lost. The report was as Jackie Fairley said. The usual methods had been gone through – charities, institutions, hospitals, methadone treatment centres, social services, police, DSS – all blank.

  The elder of two sisters, youngest still living with her mother. Parents divorced when Karen was twelve, pressure of father’s work blamed. Father married to his job, policeman. Karen took the divorce hard. Father’s favourite, now forced to live with her mother who refused the girls any contact with him, persuading them he was to blame for everything. Karen began to believe he had never loved her.

  Her home life was unhappy – she and her mother had never got on. The mother remarried. Karen and the stepfather took a mutual dislike to each other. She began to run away, short jaunts at first, longer each time. Social Services brought her back, intervened, but were powerless to do anything. When she turned sixteen she left and didn’t go back. Her mother washed her hands of her. With one daughter and a new husband, Karen was more trouble than she was worth.

  Larkin had read Karen’s biography uneasily, the details of her life rendered in a just-the-facts-ma’am Joe Friday kind of way, a form of journalism he had never been able to master. It was both personal and impersonal, like trespassing in a house, close yet distant from someone. He tried to be as objective as possible, but he couldn’t help letting his imagination colour the heartache between the words.

  Details now become sketchy. Her father moved to Newcastle. Despite efforts on his part, Karen refused to contact him, still blaming him for everything. She drifted into drugs, heroin in particular, and began to mix with people who dragged her down. It was during this time that she became HIV positive.

  After a while she began to tell her peer group that she’d met someone and was going to London to make a new start. No one took much notice one way or the other. Junkies always talked like that. Then one day she was gone. At first her friends missed her, wondered where she was, but gradually began to forget she had ever been there as the need for the next fix took precedence.