The Disappeared. Ali Harper

      The back room also has a broom cupboard – now converted to Jo’s spy equipment store – which has a safe cemented into the brick wall at the back of it. That small metal box had sealed the deal when we’d been looking for premises. We figured the previous tenants must have been dope dealers.

      I cleared a space on the table by stashing the playing cards to one side and setting the ashtray on the floor.

      ‘You smoke in here?’ She didn’t miss much, I thought.

      ‘No. Well, only in emergencies. I mean, sometimes clients—’

      ‘Would you mind if I smoked?’ she asked.

      ‘Oh. No, not at all. I’ll open the kitchen window.’

      When I got back, she’d lit a long, dark brown cigarette, and I noticed the tremor in her hands. Jo popped her head round the door and handed me a new client file.

      ‘Right, yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

      I heard the click of the kettle from the kitchenette. I opened the file, spread it on the table in front of me and cleared my throat. ‘So, how can we help you?’

      ‘I don’t think you can.’ She blew a cloud of smoke into the air. ‘I was stupid to come.’

      I bristled at that. It’s personal – the business; my chance to put right what I’ve done wrong. OK, this woman was our first potential proper client, but it wasn’t like we didn’t have previous experience. Besides trying to track down my own dysfunctional family, last year Jo and I travelled to the other side of the world to find a missing person – Bert’s wife. Bert lived next door to my mum, took care of her in what turned out to be her last years. Me and Jo managed to track down his missing mail-order bride, in Thailand, despite not knowing the language. We have a natural flair for finding people.

      ‘You had your reasons,’ I said.

      ‘I saw your ad. About reuniting families.’

      I extracted Jo’s Initial Enquiry Form and read the tag line out loud. ‘Are you missing someone?’

      ‘Yes.’

      I waited a moment, but she didn’t expand. I coughed again and wished I had a glass of water. ‘Who? Who are you missing?’

      ‘My son.’

      Another silence. ‘What’s his name?’

      ‘I don’t know what to do.’

      I tried to sound like a well-seasoned investigator, battle weary. ‘Start with his name.’

      ‘Jack.’

      I made a note on the form as she exhaled. Instinct told me to stick to simple questions. ‘Age?’

      ‘He’s 22.’ She stubbed out the first cigarette, which was only a third of the way smoked, and lit another straightaway. ‘I was very young,’ she said, in answer to a question I hadn’t asked. But it did make me think. I stared at her, but she held her cigarette to her lips almost permanently, so that her hand obscured the bottom half of her face. It was hard to put an age to her. Older than me, but I’d be surprised if she’d hit forty. ‘He’s had problems.’

      ‘Problems?’

      ‘He’s driven us to our wits’ end. We’ve given him everything. Cash. Car. You name it.’

      ‘And now he’s missing?’

      ‘Not a word in three months.’

      I wrote that down. ‘Tell me about the last time you saw him.’

      ‘Christmas. He came round for dinner, borrowed twenty pounds.’

      ‘This was to your house?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘In Leeds?’

      ‘Manchester. But he came back to Leeds. He’s a student here. Or he was.’

      ‘Where does he live?’

      She sat a little straighter in the chair and leaned in. ‘That’s why I chose you. You being so close, I mean. The last address I had for him was a squat on Burchett Grove. It’s not very far from here.’

      I got a shot in my veins; the feeling’s hard to describe, like I’m kind of coming alive. A trail, a scent of someone. I knew Burchett Grove. Locals called it Bird Shit Grove. It was ten minutes away, in Woodhouse, an area of Leeds favoured by the politically earnest. This was my neck of the woods.

      ‘Which one?’

      She put her hand in her jacket pocket and took out a piece of paper, ripped from the pages of a spiral bound notebook. She handed it to me. ‘I hate going round there.’ Her whole body juddered as if to prove her point. ‘The last time I went, they said he’d moved. I don’t know if they were telling the truth.’

      I probably grinned, reading the address. There are two squats on Burchett Grove, and I’ve known people living at both of them over the years. If he was there we could have the case cracked in minutes. I might even know the guy. ‘You got a photo?’

      She picked her handbag up from the floor and flicked the clasp. After some rummaging she pulled out a photograph of a lanky teenager in school uniform.

      I frowned at her. ‘A recent one?’

      She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘He hates having his photo taken. That’s the sixth form. He dropped out a few months after that.’

      ‘When did he move to Leeds?’

      She scratched at the back of her neck again. ‘Five years ago. Hired a van, insisted on doing it all on his own.’

      ‘What will you do if we find him and he doesn’t want to see you?’ This was a standard question we’d agreed to ask everyone. We weren’t naive. Families often split for good reasons.

      She squared back her shoulders. ‘I can live with that,’ she said. I caught a glimpse of an inner steeliness and I believed her. ‘I just need to know where he is, that he’s OK.’

      I told her what we charged, and she nodded. Jo had included a blank contract in the file. I passed it to her and read upside down as she printed her name. Mrs Susan Wilkins. As she filled in her address details, she glanced up at me.

      ‘There’s another thing. You have to promise you won’t contact my husband.’

      She stared at me with piercing blue eyes. I shrugged. No skin off my nose. ‘You’re the boss,’ I said.

      ‘He’s washed his hands of Jack. He’ll go berserk if he knows what I’m doing.’ She pushed the contract back to me, the still-damp ink glistening in the fluorescent overheads.

      ‘You haven’t put your mobile.’

      ‘I dropped it,’ she said. She raised her eyebrows at me. ‘Silly of me. They’re replacing the screen. I’m staying at the Queens. Could we perhaps agree a time each day where I call you and you give me a progress report?’

      ‘OK.’ I handed her a business card with my mobile number, and she tucked it into her jacket pocket. I cleared my throat. ‘So, there’s just the matter of the fees.’

      ‘Yes.’ She opened her bag again and paid the deposit – two hundred pounds – in cash, counting out ten-pound notes from a brown envelope. No Stone Unturned, Leeds’s brand new missing persons’ bureau, had its first client.

      And it promised to be a straightforward case – middle-class kid, starts college, smokes dope, forgets to ring his mother. We’d have this in the bag by the weekend, I remember thinking. I had no sense of what was in store for us. Now, as I sit here, trying to write this report and pick through the pieces of the last few days, it’s easy to see that the signs were all there, I just didn’t read them. We fit the pictures to the story we want to hear. And what I wanted to see was a middle-aged, middle-class woman, desperately