According to the rest of his office, no one had been in contact with Anthony Blick since Aneesa, over a week ago, and no one had seen him since he left for his trip, six months before. I didn’t raise the fact that the timing coincided with the breakdown of Natasha and Freddie’s marriage, the vicious, anonymous notes, but it played on my mind.
By the time we got back to the firm it was last thing on a Friday afternoon, and the small team were already filing out for pre-weekend drinks. We went to the office. Trawled through Anthony Blick’s address book for a half-brother Aneesa vaguely remembered. When we got him on the phone he claimed they’d fallen out years before and not spoken since. Aneesa got up from the desk abruptly and started for her own office.
‘Facebook,’ she said. ‘He’s been all over it.’ She logged on to her own computer and sent several messages in quick succession, none of which were acknowledged or answered. We were both staring at the screen, at a loss, when it refreshed.
A new picture was posted to his account.
It was similar in style to the one Freddie Coyle had shown me when I’d first interviewed him. Similar in style to the one I’d seen when casually searching for Blick’s page the previous night. It was Anthony Blick, a large, red-faced man, with his shirt wide open, and his arm around a young Thai woman. Aneesa and I looked at each other in confusion, and I checked the time.
It was 6 p.m. exactly.
‘Scroll back,’ I said. ‘I want to see what time the others were posted.’
The previous picture, showing Blick with a street vendor, had been posted at 6 p.m. the day before. The one before that, showing Blick stood by a body of water, was posted at 6 p.m. the day before that. Blick at a restaurant: 6 p.m. Hotel lobby: 6 p.m. Roof terrace: 6 p.m.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Aneesa said. ‘They’re auto-posting.’
Aneesa had officially reported Anthony Blick missing, and I’d called Natasha Reeve and Freddie Coyle to tell them the news. I also wanted to know when each of them had spoken to him last. Both had supported his decision to take some time out in the wake of his health scare the previous year, and apparently neither had anything but email contact with him since.
My next job was to begin tracing his movements. Phone, bank and flight records. Mobile information was simplest. The rest would take time. As a precautionary measure, and with Aneesa’s consent, I asked SOCO to attempt the collection of DNA from Blick’s office. He’d seemingly walked out on his life with some level of premeditation, and I wondered if he was tied into the smiling man’s murder. The real revelation came when I viewed his mobile data.
Anthony Blick’s phone had never left the city.
Anthony Blick’s phone had been switched off since the day he’d been due to leave for Thailand.
I was trying to come to some kind of conclusion on this when my own phone started to vibrate.
It was Sian.
It had been a long day, and the last time we spoke she’d been angry with me. That wasn’t the real reason I hesitated, though. The photographs that Ricky found had kept me awake for hours after my last shift, then when I’d finally closed the curtains on the morning sun, finally closed my eyes, someone buzzed for my flat. There was no one at the door when I went, cautiously, down the stairs, but someone continued to buzz it, at irregular intervals, until I gave up on sleep, showered, and left. Knowing that Bateman was the man behind my harassment only made things worse. He could have gone back to the bar. He could have shown Sian the pictures of me, and she could have come to the same conclusions Ricky had.
That I was using drugs again.
‘Beat me up as well?’ Ricky had said. ‘I told you, Sian tells me everything.’
I thought of the final night we’d spent together. We hadn’t talked about my newly emerging sleep troubles. The night terrors that left me exhausted by morning, and left her cautious around me, afraid, I thought. I’d started spending more time away, more nights, making poor excuses for why I couldn’t meet her at the end of a shift and why I couldn’t spend a day off in her company. After some weeks of this, she’d arrived on my doorstep one night with a bag of shopping and a smile. She’d kissed me on the cheek and walked inside like there was nothing wrong between us, and I got some idea of what I must mean to her. I remember standing in the doorway, watching her go inside, and getting some idea of what she meant to me. We fell back into our old routine that night, laughing about her regulars, worrying and wondering about mine. Finishing the bottle and then going to bed.
That night I dreamt of a family of four, driving out to a house in the middle of nowhere. I dreamt of a terrifying slender man and a woman with a wide-open throat.
I woke up to the sound of a gunshot.
When I did, I was at the foot of the bed. My head was in Sian’s lap and she was talking quietly, telling me it was OK. The room was a mess and my first thought was that an earthquake had hit the building. Then I saw the marks on my hands. Broken nails, cuts and bruises. I got up, unsteadily, and looked about. The curtains had been ripped off the wall, a lampshade had been smashed. There was a crack in the window.
I’d gone into the bathroom.
Watched my face warp and alter in the glass, and thought I was going to be sick. I opened the toilet, saw bloody tissues inside it and tried to think. Sian was straightening up when I went back into the bedroom. She smiled at me and I noticed that her hair was down.
She never wore her hair down.
What a time to start thinking like a detective. I asked about it and she tried to walk around me. When I took a step closer, she took a step back. I pinned her up against the wall and moved her hair while she fought me off. There was a large plaster on the side of her face, covering a cut or a bruise.
I took a step back. My ears were ringing. ‘Was that me?’
‘It’s OK …’
But I felt sick. I was walking out, getting dressed, going for the door.
‘Aid,’ she said. ‘Aidan—’
‘I want you gone when I get back.’
I’d said it without turning around.
I came, slowly, back to the present. The phone had almost vibrated off the table when I picked it up.
‘Aid,’ she said. ‘Aidan …’
‘Sian.’
‘He’s here again. That guy who was asking about you.’
7
My sister had a chubby face, intelligent, heart-wrenching blue eyes and a perpetual thinker’s frown. Some of my earliest memories are of warming my hands on her head, which always seemed to be hot with thought or feeling. Too hot with thought and feeling for a five-year-old girl, but I only realized later that she was a preoccupied, sickly child. Malnourished and so scared of our mother that it could make her physically sick. To me she was simply my sister and to me this was simply our life.
I learned more about her from the reactions of others. The children in new schools, laughing because she wore her brother’s hand-me-downs. Concerned adults, bending or crouching down to her height, quietly asking me how much sleep she got. The bags under her eyes looked like bruises. If questions persisted we’d stop going to school. We’d move house in the middle of the night, carrying our things in bin bags. Occasionally we stayed with friends, with friends of friends. Occasionally we stayed with strange, new men.