PAIN HAS A PERMANENT ADDRESS - READ BETWEEN THE LIES

PAIN HAS A PERMANENT ADDRESS - EPISODE TWO

Chapter Five

After lunch, we all went our separate ways: Kira to the mortuary, Silver to the station, and I went to sit on the harbour wall to scroll through the numbers on my phone.  When I got to the one I wanted, I hit ‘Call.’

  “Citizens Advice Bureau.”

  I smiled.  “Oh, come on.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Citizens Advice?”

  “John?”

  “Yeah.  How are you doing, Grahame?”

  “It’s been ages, son.”

  We chatted for a while, catching up.  Grahame Moore was a forty-something hacker.  On certain cases, he’d been an incredible source of information.  He could get beyond any firewall without leaving a trace, bagging names, numbers, and email addresses, even credit histories and contracts while he was there.  He ran this cash-only information service out of his flat in Oxmarket.

  “So, what can I do for you, son?”

  He had a slight Suffolk accent and always called me ‘son’ whenever I phoned him.  It was a term of endearment from a man who didn’t often express his feelings.

  “I need you to fire up the super computer.”

  “Course I can.  What you got?”

  “A background check on a Sabrina Muller.  She’s German.  I think she lives somewhere in Oxmarket.”

  “Okay, no problem.  You’ll have to give me a couple of hours, though.”

  “Sure.”

  I gave him all the details I had.

  “Oh, and my fee’s gone up a bit,” he said.

  “Whatever it takes, Grahame.”

  I hung up and then looked at my watch.  Ten minutes past three.  I walked in the direction of my office, but then I stopped dead.

  About a quarter of a mile down on my left, Isabella was crossing the road.  She looked both ways, waited for Bruno to indicate it was safe to proceed, and moved off in the opposite direction.

  I followed her, keeping to the other side of the street before she disappeared at the end of the road.

  I stood there, frozen to the spot, uncertainly pumping through my veins.  Something flooded my chest, a sense that I’d been here before, in the first few weeks after Zoë’s death: standing on the edge of a precipice, watching the ground crumble beneath my feet.

  But then I saw my reflection in a nearby shop window and realized how much direction and energy it had returned to me.  And I understood that if I wanted to carry on moving forward, this was something I had to do.  A step I had to take.

  So, I went after her.

  When I got to the end of the road I saw her and slowed my walking pace a little, as I got closer.

  “Isabella?”

  She stopped and turned.  “Yes?”

  “It’s John Handful,” I said.  “The private detective.”

  “Have you found, Buster?”

  “No, sorry.”

  Her shoulders sagged.

  “You seemed extremely upset earlier.”

  Her face creased a little.  A frown.  “I’m worried about Buster.”

  “I see.”

  “I love him.”

  “Do you want to go somewhere and talk?”

  She shrugged and turned away. But when she turned back, her expression had changed to a kind of relief, as if she’d just reached the biggest decision of her life.

  “If you’re paying, there’s a place nearby that allows dogs.”

  We walked in silence, and I tried to figure whether she was scared, or confident, or both, but I gave up as we reached the café. THE BURGER EXPRESS, was an old railway carriage set inside a series of railway arches.  A blue neon sign above the door read HOT FOOD.  We settled at one of the tables and Bruno relaxed beside her.  There were seven tables and a couple sat at the table the furthest away from us.  Apart from that, it is the café was empty.

  “Didn’t realize we were going posh,” I joked.

  “Can I have the burger with everything on?” 

  “Of course.” 

 “What are you having?”

  “Just a coffee, I haven’t long eaten.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  A woman emerged from inside wearing a retro waitress’s uniform, a name badge that read YVONNE, THE BURGER EXPRESS and a face that could turn a man to stone.

  “What can I get you?” she barked.

  “Burger with everything on,” Isabella smiled.  “A Coke and a bowl of water for the dog? John?”

  I looked at the waitress.  “Coffee. Black. No sugar.”

  The waitress disappeared again.  I stared at Isabella for a few moments, while she tried to gauge something with her remaining senses.

  I observed her hands spread like wings on the table, the suggestion of her fragile waist, the shape of her neck, and the line of her lips, which at that moment I would have given my soul to stroke with the tip of my fingers.  Never before had I had a chance to examine a woman so closely and with such precision, yet without the danger of meeting her eyes.

  “What are you looking at?”  She asked, not without a pinch of malice.

  “You don’t look like someone who would eat burger and chips,” I improvised.  My mouth felt dry.

  “Why is that?  Because I’m blind or too thin?”

  Fearful of making another embarrassing error, I decided to remain silent.  I just sat gawking at her imbibing presence.

  “Can I ask you a favour?”

  “Depends on what it is,” I said.

  Before she could answer, the waitress arrived with her meal.  Isabella didn’t waste any time, biting down on the burger, juices bubbling beneath the bun.

  I watched in silence, sipping my coffee while she devoured the burger.  The French fries she pushed absent-mindedly around her plate, offering the odd one to Bruno after cooling it with a soft a gentle blow of her pursed lips.

  “I would like to see what you look like,” she said suddenly.

  At first, I was puzzled, but when I saw Isabella raising her right hand, trying to find me, I understood.

  “Of course,” I said politely.

  Without knowing what to do, I too stretched out my hand towards her.  She took it in her left hand, without saying anything, and then offered me her right hand.  Instinctively I understood what she was asking me to do, and I guided her to my face.  Her touch was firm and delicate, her fingers ran over my cheekbones. I sat there motionless, hardly daring to breathe, while Isabella read my features with her hands.  While she did, she smiled to herself, and I noticed a slight movement of her lips, like a voiceless murmuring.  I felt the brush of her hands on my forehead, on my hair and on my eyelids.  She paused on my face, following their shape with her forefinger and ring finger.  Her fingers smelled of cinnamon.  I swallowed feeling my pulse race, not really knowing whether, to the touch of a blind woman, my face was one that you could trust.  I gave silent thanks that there was no one sitting close enough to see my blushing, which could have lit a cigarette from a short-distance away.

Chapter Six

That afternoon, Isabella stole my heart, my breath, and my sleep.  In that strange café near the Oxmarket railway station, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that was to hound me for the rest of the day.  When I stared, enraptured, she explained how she never knew her father and for a few years, it was just her and her mother.

  Isabella spoke about her life and how her mother raised her alone.  I lost myself in her porcelain glaze and listened to her talk about things I couldn’t really comprehend.  She described people, scenes, and objects she had never seen yet rendered them with the detail and precision of John Constable.  Her words evoked textures and echoes, the colour of voice, the rhythm of footsteps.

  She explained how she felt when her mother started the kennels and then Buster Bill came into their lives.

  “He was like a breath of fresh air,” she told me.  “Until then I didn’t know what had been missing from our lives.  I had never known the joy of a man being about the home.  He introduced me to reading, listening to music, letting my imagination carry me away to the beauty, the mystery of fiction and language, and the sound of an orchestra coming together.”

  My brain seized up; my mouth turned to sawdust.

  “He bought me this ring.”  She held up her hand with the wreath of sapphires on it.

  “Very nice,” I said.

  “He brought such a joy to my life, I will never forget him.  I live in a world of shadows, Mr Handful, and magic is a rare asset.  Buster taught me I could live more intensely.  He gave me back the sight I had lost.  He changed my life. I want you to find him.”

  “We will try our best, Isabella.”

  “I hope so.  He means so much to me.”

  “Were you and Buster lovers?” 

  A tear ran down her cheek.  She didn’t need to say anything. 

  I wouldn’t have cared anyway because by now I was dumbstruck, at the mercy of this creature whose words and charms I had neither the means nor the desire to resist.  I wished that she would never stop speaking, her voice would wrap itself around me forever, and solving this case would not break the spell that belonged only to me.

  Call me shallow or fickle, but this young woman mesmerized me. The waitress came with the bill and I suddenly realized that two hours had passed.  They had seemed like two minutes.  I handed her the cash and told her to keep the change.

  We separated outside the café with a polite handshake and a promise from me to be in touch as soon as I’d heard anything.  Even the guide dog offered his right paw before they headed back towards the harbour.

  I watched her walk away and grabbed a hold of myself and thought of Kira Reed.  What the hell was I doing?

  I waited until she was out of sight and almost felt relieved.  I felt embarrassed and turned around and headed away from the harbour.

  It was still quite a hot day and down on the beach someone had a barbecue going. I smelled charcoal and charred meat.  Cans of lager appeared from open car boots.  Children were running along the tide-line.  This was the view that appeared on all the tourist postcards.  The sand was white and fine and the water was obvious and blue.  An image of paradise for the visitors.

   My phone rang.

  “John Handful.”

  “John, its Grahame.”

  “Grahame – what have you got for me?”

  I could hear him using a keyboard.  “I traced Sabrina Muller through mobile phone networks.”

  “Okay.”

  “You got a pen?”

  “I don’t need one.”

  “She works at Magic Touch Remedial Therapy Centre in Oxmarket.”

  “Where?”

  “A massage parlour.”

  “Bloody hell,” I exclaimed. 

  “I’ve got their website in front of me,” he went on.  “’Here at Magic Touch, we offer the complete experience to help you relax and enjoy yourself.  We all know there is nothing worse than suffering from the aches and pains that the stresses of the day can put into your tired bodies, but why put up with it?  We offer several types of remedial therapy.  These include massage, sauna, etc.’”

  “Sounds like my sort of place,” I joked.

  “Then it’s got some photographs of the room.  Quite plush.  It’s opening hours and then there is also a list of the girl’s names.”

  “Give them to me,” I told him.

  “Victoria –English, red-head with green eyes.  Goldie –tanned attractive German, in her mid-twenties.  Martina – tall and blonde.  Jessie – English-Caribbean dark haired mature.  Shelley – Caribbean bubbly personality, mid-twenties.  Rebecca – Italian, petite.  Sabrina – German, long blonde hair, size eight, slim and tanned.  Nadia – she is of Thai nationality.”

  “Quite a mixed bag,” I exclaimed.

  “I don’t know if that’s any help.”

  “That’s great,” I told him.  “You’re a magic man.  I’ll get you the money later.”

  “You got it.”

  I killed the call and made my way into the centre of Oxmarket. 

  After buying me a coffee, I found a spot in an alleyway across the street from the Magic Touch Remedial Therapy Centre.  Sandwiched between a post office and dry cleaners’ it could have passed for an antique shop with all the ornaments in the window.

  Laughter sounded nearby.

  A couple, dressed in business suits, walked into a nearby restaurant.  Opposite, a group of teenaged girls giggled and stopped outside the Bull and Butcher pub.  They looked at each other.  One played with her hair, another adjusted her skirt.  Then they all reached into their bags for their IDs.

 A girl came out of Magic Touch, a redhead in a leather skirt and fishnet stockings. She lit a cigarette.  I backed up further into the alleyway.  She registered the movement and glanced across the street, eyes narrowing, head tilting.  She lingered for a second more as if trying to satisfy her curiosity, before disappearing back inside.

  The street quietened.

  I sipped at the coffee.

  The silence was disturbed by a group of women, moving along the street.  Behind them, a man followed close by.  I recognized him as one of the workforce from the kennels.  Some women looked over their shoulders at him – a look that suggested that if they’d been on their own, they might have been worried.  He dropped back a little as they passed the front of Magic Touch.  He stopped mid-step as if someone unseen talked to him, and then speeded up once more.  Some girls at the back of the group flicked a look at him again; one of them – fired up with alcohol – turned and asked, “What’s your problem?”  But the argument fizzled out when she saw his attention was no longer focused on them or where they were headed.  He looked across the street.

  Directly at me.

Chapter Seven

He suddenly ran at me with an animal-like growl. The sheer unexpectedness of it caught me off guard.  I was also surprised by the knife that had suddenly appeared in his left-hand curving upwards in a wicked arc and aimed for a point just below my breastbone.  He might have done a nice job of carving me up, but he was not only bigger than me but slower than well.  I caught and clamped his knife wrist with both hands, threw myself backwards, straightened a leg under him as I jerked down and sent him catapulting over me.

  I twisted and got to my feet in one motion just as the man came at me again and grabbed my throat.  I poked my fingers into the attacker’s eyes sockets, and he screamed out in pain, releasing my throat, and falling back, but not out of range of my right foot that kicked up into his groin.  He doubled over, and I snapped my knee up into the chin, hearing the jaw crack.  He let out a terrible moan and crumpled to the ground.

  I checked his pulse.  He was still alive.  Just. I decided against calling the police.  They would only clog up the investigation. I went to the end of the alleyway and checked for any of his friends waiting to jump me before I crossed the street.

 I gained access to the massage parlour through a public-address system, noticing two CCTV cameras pointing directly at me, and was greeted by the redhead, who didn’t seem to recognize me.

  “Hello, darling.” she said, trying to be alluring.

  “Is Sabrina in?”

  She glanced at a large diary on the table beside her.  “Have you made an appointment?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “She’s busy at the moment.”

  “Can I wait?”

  “Of course, take a seat.”

  I sat down on a tatty sofa and next to the small television in the corner of the room showing hard-core pornography.  Opposite me, I noticed a set of French doors that opened out onto a paved backyard, ornamental with potted plants.

  Above my head, I heard creaking floorboards, followed by the not too discreet sound of a window opening.  A few seconds later a figure dropped past the window and landed athletically in the backyard.

  I caught a glimpse of Sabrina Muller’s face and saw pure unadulterated fear in her eyes.

  I rushed to the French doors.  The redhead tried to stop me but when she saw the angry look on my face, she thought better of it.  As I opened the doors, Sabrina had vaulted the fence and was sprinting up the rear lane.  She was wearing trainers, tracksuit bottoms and a hooded sweatshirt.

  I did an unceremonious stomach roll over the fence and landed heavily on the cobblestones.  She was twenty yards ahead of me already, heading for a gate.  I didn’t know whether I could catch her.

  Sabrina pushed through a dilapidated old gate without breaking her stride. I, however, had to smash through because it was slippery underfoot, the forest was rotten, the hinges rusty, and I couldn’t stop. She turned left, dodged an overflowing skip, and crossed the road, leaping a hedge as she cut the corner of an adjoining road.

  I kept running, getting closer with every stride.

  She disappeared into a crowd of tourists.  I headed, to where the group – gathering around a tour guide – blocked the pavement.  She emerged on the other side and crossed the street.

  Forcing my way through the crowd, I could see her barging through another group of tourists further down.  One of them stumbled as she pushed past and called after her.  But when she looked back it wasn’t to apologize, it was to see how close I was.

  I tried to move faster, put my head down for a second, and lost her.  She’d gone behind a cinema queue.  I crossed the street.  There was a narrow back alley close to the queue.  As I got closer, she burst out from a knot of people about halfway down, glanced at me once and then disappeared into the alley.

  When I got to the mouth of the alley, I hadn’t realized how dark it would be.  I couldn’t see her, but I could hear the echo of her footsteps.  She was a long way ahead of me, almost on to the next street.

  By the time I got to the end, she was gone.  I stood for a moment, looking both ways.  There were crowds on both sides of the street, and cars passing along it.  And there were shadows everywhere.  Doorways to disappear in, tiny vessels of lanes and alleys that would hide her for as long as she needed.

  A sudden movement caught my eye.

  There she was.  Heading out of town.  Heading out towards the countryside and Oxmarket Forest.

  I went after her.  She had a hundred-metre start on me, but I was determined to catch her.

  She took the footpath route to the forest.  Running on uneven ground. 

  To make sure I didn’t fall over, I kept on glancing at the ground in front of me.  It was full of dead leaves and disturbed earth.  An image came back to me of Zoë standing next to her grave, looking down into the darkness.

  Suddenly, Sabrina veered off the path into dense forest on the right.  Here the ground started to rise, sloping upwards through the undergrowth.

  The deeper we went the darker it became.  The September sun carved through irregular gaps in the canopy, forming pale tubes of light.  Where it couldn’t penetrate the foliage, the forest were as black as oil.  Beneath my feet, I could feel the grass, and uneven ground – the sort of ground you could break an ankle running across.

  She was getting away from me.  I stumbled over a tree stump and nearly lost my balance.  I tried to make my strides longer, trying to swallow up as much ground as possible.  Huge trees lurched out of the darkness nearly knocking me off balance.

  Sabrina arched further to the right, deeper into the forest.  I tried to up the pace, every bone in my body aching, every nerve prickling, and saw that the foliage thickened about twenty feet ahead.  It became dense quickly, most of it hidden from the sunlight, making for a difficult chase.  I followed her, ducking down.  Thorny branches scratched against my skin.  The darkness seemed all around.  I moved through the shrubbery as fast as I could. Beyond the noise of the branches, cracking and splintering against me, I expected to hear Sabrina ahead of me.

  I stopped and dropped to the ground.

  For a moment, all I could hear was blood being pumped through my body, a thumping sound, so loud it felt like it was echoing through the trees.

  Something cracked to my right.  I turned and narrowed my eyes, willing myself to see into the enclosing gloom.

  Then suddenly out of the vast foreboding surroundings came a strange cry.  It came through the trees like a long, deep mutter before rising to a howl so fearful, the whole of Oxmarket forest throbbed with it.  It was strident, wild, and menacing.