‘What you doing?’ Ester stares at me from the doorway, a blue toothbrush in her hand, a horrified expression on her face.
‘It’s Keisha’s passport.’ I pull the book from the drawer and flick through it, looking for the date stamp and photo then hold it towards Ester. ‘Look, it doesn’t expire for three years. How would she get back to Ireland without it? You can’t get in with just a driving licence these days.’
‘But …’ She shakes her head. ‘Why say she go home in her note?’
‘I don’t know.’ I look at the toothbrush in her hand. ‘But wherever she did go, she went there in a hurry.’
Chapter 27
‘Alright, Mrs Jackson,’ Ella doesn’t look the slightest bit surprised to see me as she opens her front door. ‘Mum’s in the back. Want me to get her?’
I shake my head. ‘Actually it was you I was hoping to talk to. Is there somewhere we can go?’
‘Let’s go to the park.’ She glances back into the hall. ‘I’ll just grab my coat.’
The front door closes and I hear her shout something about popping to the corner shop and then she reappears in front of me, a crisp ten-pound note in her hand.
She grins. ‘Mum asked me to get her some fags while I was out.’
‘If this is about the phone,’ Ella says as we sit down on a weather-worn bench on the edge of Queen’s Park, ‘then you’re wrong if you think I nicked it. I didn’t. I only had it because me and Charlotte had a row at school, in the changing rooms after a games lesson. It was a couple of days before, you know …’
‘Her accident?’
‘Yeah. She left it behind on the bench when she called me a jealous cow and stormed off. I thought I’d keep it for a bit and make her freak out that she’d lost it but then she got hit by a bus.’ She peels the cellophane off her mother’s Marlboro Lights, tears off the foil and prises out a cigarette with her fingernails. ‘I didn’t want to give it to you because everyone would think I’d nicked it so I kept quiet. But then the stuff you said to me made me feel really guilty so I, you know …’
‘Posted it through our letterbox?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Thank you, Ella,’ I smile. ‘Really, thank you for telling the truth and giving the phone back. But that’s not why I’m here.’
She raises her eyebrows. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, I need to know who Mike is.’
‘Mike?’ She blinks as the wind changes direction and her exhaled smoke is blown back in her face. ‘How’d you know about him?’
‘Keisha told me.’
‘Oh.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘That figures.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing.’ She puts the cigarette to her lips again and inhales. She smokes like a fifty-year-old grandmother on forty a day.
‘Come on Ella, it’s not nothing.’
She tips back her head and exhales. ‘They’re just dicks, that’s all. Both of them. No wonder they hang around together.’
I frown. ‘He’s her friend?’
‘That or her minder.’ She laughs. ‘The only time they’re not together is when Keisha’s with Danny and that’s because he refuses to have him anywhere near him. He thinks Mike’s a creepy gay, which he is.’
‘A gay?’ I assume she means that in the derogatory sense.
‘Yeah,’ she glances at me, ‘you know, he likes men.’
What? That contradicts what Keisha told me last night. How can Mike have used a female prostitute and be a gay man? It doesn’t make sense. I look at the packet of cigarettes in Ella’s hands. There’s nothing I’d like more than to spark one up. Instead I cross my arms against the wind, tucking my hands under my armpits. ‘How well did Charlotte know him?’
‘Pretty bloody well!’ She gives me a sideways look. ‘You know, don’t you? That’s what this is all about? You’re pretending like you’re clueless but actually you’re trying to catch me out.’
‘Something like that …’ I say tentatively, knowing my lie could be discovered in a heartbeat.
‘Oh, thank God!’ She throws her spent cigarette at the ground then slumps back on the bench. ‘I thought about telling you, after what we talked about the last time you came round but Charlotte made me swear not to tell anyone. I mean, I know we’re not friends anymore but I’m no grass.’
‘I think this is a pretty unique situation, don’t you, Ella? Grassing someone up to their parents is a bit different if they’re on life support, right?’
‘Yeah.’ Her head drops and she fiddles with the toggles on her coat.
‘Tell me what you know,’ I say softly.
‘Neither of us liked Mike the first time Keisha introduced him to us,’ she says. ‘He was old and overly friendly and there was something really sly about his eyes.’
I nod for her to continue.
‘But, after Keisha went off to find Danny, Mike offered to buy us some drinks. We thought he was on the pull, dirty old git, so figured we’d get the most expensive cocktails we could out of him before we did a runner. I had a …’ she dismisses the thought with a wave of her hand, ‘doesn’t matter what we had but while we were drinking them Mike started telling us how he was new to Brighton. He said he’d moved here from London to make a fresh start after splitting up with his boyfriend and losing his niece Martha to cancer. He said he really loved her, said she was like a daughter to him and that Charlotte reminded him of her. I thought that was a bit creepy but Charlotte thought it was sweet.’