Read Online You Will Never Find Me by Robert Wilson - Free Book Online Page A

herself.
    â€˜Just tell me where I can find Glider, Marcus.’
    â€˜He not going to love me for sending you to his door.’
    â€˜You said that last night.’
    â€˜Did I? Must be all that weed making me forgetful.’
    Yes, that figured, thought Mercy. The taste of it still in her mouth. The smell of it still heavy in the flat like a morning mist in the tropics.
    â€˜I’m only interested in Amy,’ said Mercy, rolling her finger over in a repeat, ‘and Glider doesn’t have to know how we got to his door.’
    â€˜He’s not a fool, G,’ said Alleyne. ‘He’ll work out the info chain. And then where my balls going to be?’
    â€˜Just tell me, Marcus, or I’ll get the plods round here to take a look at this lot,’ she said, nodding into the room.
    He gave her an address near the Caledonian Road in north London.
    â€˜Is that why you slept with me, Mercy?’ he said, smiling. ‘Break me down?’
    â€˜It seemed to work.’
    â€˜You’re cruel, lady, you know that? You’re very cruel,’ he said. ‘Not to me. No, sister. You’re cruel on yourself. You need to take your foot off that pedal driving you into the dark.’
    Is it that obvious? she thought, looking at him, questioning. ‘Thanks,’ she said, and brushed past him.
    â€˜You going to call me?’ he asked, amused at this odd reversal for him.
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜I like you. When you’re nice and smoothed out you’re a very likeable woman.’
    â€˜Goodbye, Marcus,’ she said, smiling. ‘The cheese on toast was memorable.’
    She turned her phone back on and left.
    In the car, messages: Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.
    â€˜Where are you?’ she asked before he could start.
    â€˜I thought I’d go and see Esme.’
    â€˜Ask her what rank ideas she stuck in Amy’s head?’
    â€˜I won’t put it like that,’ said Boxer. ‘You?’
    â€˜Work. Talk to DCS Makepeace, see if I can get some flexibility on time. Chase the UK Border Agency. Go and see Amy’s teachers and the headmistress at Streatham and Clapham High. And I’ve got an address for Glider.’
    â€˜How did you get that?’
    â€˜I slept around; people told me things.’
    Boxer wasn’t sure how to take that—not funny enough for a joke, too ugly for the truth.
    â€˜I got to Marcus Alleyne, broke him down,’ she said to end the silence, and gave him Glider’s address. ‘It would be better if
you
went round to see Glider. Alleyne doesn’t want the responsibility for sending the cops to his door and . . . he’s violent.’
    Â 
    Boxer called his mother, said he was coming to see her. She didn’t sound overjoyed, but then again she was someone who, if she’d felt joy, would be disinclined to show it.
    Esme Boxer lived in an expensive development in Hampstead. The old Consumption Hospital in Mount Vernon. From the outside it looked like the set of a Victorian horror movie with a pointed turret on the corner, from which someone could be hurled onto the sharp railings below. Esme had a two-bedroomed apartment on the first floor. They sat in the kitchen, where she made coffee for one. Esme smoked Marlboros full strength, despising anyone who ate, drank, smoked or even spelled anything ‘Lite’, and poured Grey Goose vodka direct from a bottle she kept in the freezer into a small shot glass. She sipped, smacked her lips, took long, luxurious drags from her cigarette, which she inhaled down to her heels, and listened to what had happened to her granddaughter.
    â€˜Well, it’s in her genes,’ she said. ‘You ran away twice and you helped Mercy run away too. What can you expect?’
    â€˜Amy didn’t know anything about that.’
    â€˜Yes, she did. I told her.’
    â€˜And why would you do a thing like that?’
    â€˜She wanted to know something