The Catch Read online

  There was no sign of Ryan at number ninety-eight.

  I hadn’t really expected to see him here again so soon, but I needed to confirm my suspicions about the house he had visited two days ago. Meetings had kept me anchored to the office on Tuesday. Today, however, I didn’t have much in my diary so I’d called in to work sick, pulled on some old jeans and a windbreaker and driven back out to the Bestwood estate.

  The latest visitor to number ninety-eight was maybe seventeen, eighteen at a push. Tall and skinny, hands shoved into the pockets of his hooded sweatshirt, he had pressed the bell, looked up and – after a long wait – been let into the house. As I watched he emerged again, hood on, head down, a quick check up and down the street and then he was walking quickly away with his hands back in his pockets. By my count, he was the third visitor in the last two hours – and just like the rest he only stayed inside for a few minutes. I was no expert, but I’d seen enough episodes of The Wire and Line of Duty to know what was probably happening inside that house. Drugs.

  My phone trilled with an unrecognised number.

  ‘Ed?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘It’s Georgia from the office, really sorry to bother you.’

  Oh, shit.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, dropping my voice lower, quieter, remembering I had called in sick. ‘I was awake anyway. What’s up?’

  ‘Julia was asking me about your response on the restructure,’ she said, an apologetic tone in her voice. ‘I’ve not had anything from you and I thought . . . I just wanted to double-check whether you’d sent it or not. I know you’ve been really busy and sometimes things can go astray on the system, so . . . ’

  ‘Damn, you know what? I was just about to finish it the other day and I got distracted by that project for the council. I’ll get it to you tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Julia said to tell you,’ she paused, ‘that the deadline has passed now.’

  I sighed, a weird knot forming in my stomach.

  ‘OK. No worries. My fault, I should have been more on the ball.’

  ‘And she said to tell you individual meetings will be next week.’

  ‘Fine. I’m sure I’ll be back at work before then.’

  Two boys in school uniform ran past my car, one chasing the other with a large stick, both whooping and yelling at the tops of their voices.

  ‘Ed?’ her voice was hesitant. She was half my age and had only joined the company six months ago, but had already developed a reputation as the MD’s eyes and ears around the office. ‘Are you . . . at home?’

  ‘Yeah, on the sofa with the telly on. Bit loud, sorry.’

  A pause.

  ‘Right.’ Disbelief, in a single word. ‘OK then.’

  ‘Hopefully see you tomorrow.’

  I ended the call with a silent curse and switched the phone to silent to prevent any distractions from what I was going to do next. Zipped my black waterproof jacket up to my chin and stepped out of the car, locking it with the remote, the only sound a dog barking somewhere in the distance, that single, monotonous note of canine alarm. Roh. Roh. Roh. I pulled my baseball cap lower and flipped up the collar of my jacket, hoping that I’d blend in slightly better today than I had on Monday. I walked across the street to number ninety-eight and pressed the doorbell. No answer. Pressed it again and knocked on the frame.

  Nothing. No sound at all from inside.

  The blinds on the front windows were drawn all the way to the sill, blocking any view into the living room. The render was peeling from the walls, dirty-white folds of it coming away from the brickwork, dislodged roof tiles perched in the gutter. But the front door was good quality, rock-solid uPVC, no handle, no letterbox, just two keyholes. It was incongruous on this house, in this neighbourhood. And there was a small white plastic housing, I noticed, mounted in the top corner above the doorframe. The small circular eye of a camera. The owner clearly didn’t like nuisance callers. I pressed the doorbell again, angled the baseball cap so it covered my eyes and turned my face up to the device.

  ‘Hello? Can you answer the door, please?’

  The camera’s lidless plastic eye gazed back at me.

  After another minute, I went to the side gate, where there was a passageway between the houses to another paved area at the back. The gate was locked and double bolted, a large sign featuring a picture of a growling Alsatian and the words ‘I live here’. I tried the doorbell one last time before heading back to my car. I was halfway across the street when I noticed a small group of people gathered around it.

  Two figures leaned against the bonnet dressed in dark hoodies and blue jeans. Two more lounged against the driver’s side door. A pulse of fear almost made me stop in the middle of the street, but I forced myself to carry on walking calmly towards them.

  The oldest one, in his mid-twenties, with black hair shaved almost to the scalp, took a step forward.

  ‘You lost, mate?’

  ‘No,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘Looking for someone.’

  ‘You find him?’

  I stopped in front of them, taking my car keys from my pocket. Don’t aggravate them. Just leave.

  ‘I was just going, actually.’

  He came closer, right up in my face, his breath hot, with a pungent mix of tobacco and chip fat.

  ‘Going? Got to pay the tax first.’

  ‘Tax?’

  ‘For parking.’ He lifted up his tracksuit top to reveal the scratched wooden handle of a carving knife in his waistband. ‘Unless you want some of this.’

  His three mates shuffled closer, forming a semi-circle around me. One of them, alone, I could probably have taken on. But not four, and not when there were knives involved. Heart thudding in my chest, I took my wallet from my jeans and passed him a twenty-pound note. Before I could close the wallet he plucked out the other notes and scrunched them into his fist.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said, leaning closer until his face was inches from mine. ‘Now you can go.’

  *

  Half an hour later and a mile down the road, my pulse had finally returned to normal. Sitting in the car park of a McDonald’s, I leaned my head back against the headrest and thought about my narrow escape – feeling foolish, but relieved. I’d dug beneath the surface, started to find out the truth about Abbie’s fiancé. So what if it had cost me fifty quid? It was a small price to pay.

  Ryan clearly had his secrets.

  But then, I supposed, so did I.

  I checked my watch: it was almost time. My regular thing, every other Wednesday, same place, same time. I had never thought it would become a long-term arrangement, but somehow it had just turned out that way. And now I’d got into the habit, I couldn’t seem to break it. Especially not after the day I’d had.

  Right now, it was exactly what I needed.

  15

  I always had a purged feeling afterwards, a lightness in my step.

  Swiftly followed by the guilt.

  At some point I would have to tell Claire what was going on. But only when the time was right. Although I’d been telling myself that for ages, ever since it had started. I wrestled with my guilt for the twenty minutes it took to drive home through crawling traffic over Trent Bridge, through stop-start queues into West Bridgford, right up until the moment I saw a white Golf GTI parked across the street from my house. George was back.

  He was sitting in his car, studying his mobile intently and he looked worse than he had two days ago, his hair lank and eyes deeply shadowed. His previous elegantly-wasted chic seemed to be changing into the real thing. I felt a weird, unexpected pang of sympathy for him, that I was going to have to crush him still further by playing my trump card, telling him that Abbie was now engaged to someone else. She’s moving in with him. She’s getting married next month. So you just need to let it go and move on, OK?

  The fact was, I didn’t want to play the Ryan card, didn’t want to be indebted to him. I didn’t want to use Ryan for anything.

&
nbsp; And that was when I had the idea. It was a pretty out-there idea, but in that moment I couldn’t think of a downside. Maybe I was looking at this situation the wrong way. Maybe I shouldn’t be pushing George away at all. Don’t use Ryan to get rid of George. Use George to get rid of Ryan.

  Because while George was certainly not a long-term prospect, he was a known entity – I had the measure of him, I knew what he was like. He was easy to read. Ryan, on the other hand, was a smiling, charming blank. A man holding something back. A man with something vital missing.

  Maybe if I manoeuvred George back into the picture, Ryan would show his true colours, reveal something of the darkness he kept hidden. I could use George: put him in the mix and play him and Ryan off against each other. I pictured Ryan angry, jealous, losing control, lashing out at George, punching him, with Abbie looking on in horror as she realised what her fiancé was really like. What he was capable of.

  And I would be there to protect Abbie, just like always.

  Putting George in play was a risky strategy and would undoubtedly be a rough deal for him however it turned out, but the stakes were higher now.

  ‘George,’ I said as he left his car and hurried across the street. ‘You’re back.’

  ‘Hey, Ed.’ Up close, his eyes were bloodshot. ‘I’ve got something for Abbie.’

  ‘I’m assuming you’ve tried knocking on the door?’

  ‘Claire told me to bugger off.’

  I couldn’t help but smile at my wife’s response. ‘She can be quite direct sometimes.’

  ‘I wrote Abbie a letter.’ He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a thick white envelope. ‘Apologising, explaining, elucidating how I feel about her.’

  ‘A letter?’

  ‘I know, right?’ He grinned. ‘How old school is that? I’ve never written anyone a letter before. But there’s so much that gets lost on email, so much of the nuance and emotion and idiosyncrasies that only really come across when you let your heart flow onto the page. And I wanted to put it into her hand myself. A personal delivery, you know?’

  I smiled and nodded. I had actually quite liked George to begin with, this young guy with his Byron-with-a-beard good looks; even his pseudo-intellectual bullshit had been quite amusing at first. Abbie had met him in the summer after she graduated, a few weeks before she was due to start teacher training at Cardiff University. He was polite and thoughtful and seemed to be smitten with her. But eventually the distance and the travelling had proved too much, and Abbie had split up with him. I even felt a little bit sorry for him initially – until he started turning up at her flat at all hours of the day, begging her to reconsider.

  I held my hand out.

  ‘I’ll make sure she gets your letter.’

  ‘Oh,’ George couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice. ‘You will?’

  I nodded. ‘And I’m sorry about the other day, I was out of line.’

  ‘I’d rather give it to her myself, so I can talk to her.’

  ‘Look, if you really want to talk to Abbie, you want my advice? You’ve got to stop turning up at the house like this. You need to do it on neutral territory. Meet her in a café, or something. Not here. Message her, just ask her, be normal. Stop following her.’

  He was about to put the thick envelope in my hand but paused at the last moment, eyes narrowed.

  ‘You’ve changed your tune rather suddenly, Ed.’

  ‘I guess everyone deserves a second chance, and it’s not for me to say what Abbie does and doesn’t want. You’re both adults. It’s up to her to decide.’

  ‘What’s your angle on all this?’

  ‘No angle. I’ve apologised and you seem sincere, and I’m sure Abbie wouldn’t want you to be upset like this.’

  George eyed me, a small smile on his lips. ‘Can I infer that you are less than impressed with Abbie’s new beau?’

  I ignored the question. ‘Listen, do you know she’s doing a 10K to raise money for a cancer charity? She’s got a pretty ambitious fundraising target, might be a nice gesture for you to make a contribution. Kind of a way for you to break the ice again, start a conversation – especially if you make your donation big enough to stand out.’

  This definitely had George’s attention. As a boyfriend he may have fallen short, but one area in which he was generously endowed was access to ready cash. His trust fund afforded him a lifestyle of which most twenty-four-year-olds could only dream.

  ‘OK,’ he said slowly, still adjusting to my change of direction. ‘I’ll take a look.’

  I gave him the information on the JustGiving charity page.

  ‘They’re trying to raise five thousand pounds. It would mean a lot to her, to make that target.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be a problem,’ George said, making a note on his phone. ‘So I can give you this, to give to her?’

  He handed me the letter, a thick white envelope with my daughter’s name inked on the front in beautiful flowing handwriting.

  ‘She’ll get it, I promise.’

  I found Abbie and Claire in the conservatory, scrolling through images of wedding dresses on the iPad.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ Abbie said. ‘Who were you talking to out there?’

  ‘Actually, it was George Fitzgerald.’

  She frowned. ‘Really? What did he want?’

  I held up the letter in its expensive envelope. ‘He wants another chance.’

  16

  THURSDAY

  Thirty-two days until the wedding

  I sat in a corner booth in Copper, a wine bar on the high street, my drink untouched on the ring-stained wooden table in front of me. It was a quiet Thursday evening, the place maybe one-third full with a few couples, a group of women on a night out and a trio of young guys in suits talking loudly over a post-work drink. I sat alone, silently trying to reconcile my concerns about Ryan with the glowing reviews he was getting from literally everyone else.

  Maybe I was losing my grip. Maybe I was a psycho-dad.

  Am I mad?

  Or can I just see something that no one else can?

  The door opened and I raised a hand to my friend Jason.

  ‘Ed!’ He said, walking over with a friendly grin. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘All right, Jason?’ I pointed to the other pint glass on the table.

  He sat down, clinked my pint glass with his and drank a third of it in one long pull. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘How’re the boys?’

  ‘Taller than me already – which is pretty scary.’

  Jason was skinny and permanently cheerful, with three sons he saw every weekend. We had been neighbours years ago, when our kids were small, when we had first moved to West Bridgford. He worked at Experian doing something arcane and technical and highly lucrative involving credit scores and postcodes and other stuff that I had never fully understood. Since his divorce he’d lived in a one-bedroom apartment in nearby Lady Bay with his encyclopaedic collection of 1980s action movies and a one-eyed cat named Gizmo.

  ‘So what’s up?’ Jason said. ‘You look terrible.’

  I laid out the story for him, from the first time Abbie had mentioned Ryan to the worries that had led me to seek his advice.

  By the time I’d finished Jason was almost ready for another drink.

  ‘And now they’re engaged?’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Blimey.’

  ‘Yup.’

  He was thoughtful for a minute. ‘You always were going to have a tough time with Abbie, though.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘You know, dads and daughters.’ He shrugged. ‘With boys, it’s different.’

  ‘Sexist, much?’

  ‘Maybe. But it just is, isn’t it?’ He signalled a waiter to bring more drinks. ‘So you’ve got a bad feeling about him, this new fella?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You think he’s a wrong ’un?’

  ‘I know he is.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just . . . do. The vibe I get, like o
nly ten per cent of him is on the surface and ninety per cent is hidden. Like an iceberg.’

  ‘Just because it’s hidden, doesn’t mean it’s bad.’

  ‘Oh, it’s bad. Trust me.’ I leaned forward, lowering my voice. ‘And I think he’s into drugs.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I saw him at a house in Bestwood. I reckon it’s a drug house, a dealer.’

  ‘You saw him?’ Jason raised an eyebrow. ‘You just happened to be there, did you?’

  ‘I . . . might have followed him.’

  He smiled, shaking his head. ‘OK. Sounds a bit Magnum PI, but fair enough if you caught him in the act.’ He paused, nodding at the waiter delivering two more pints of Harvest Pale to our table. ‘So what are we going to do about him?’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Of course, she’s my goddaughter. So come on, the two of us!’ He gave my arm a playful punch. ‘You were there for me when everything went tits up in my life. When I was all over the place, you helped me sort stuff out with Rachel and the divorce so I could still see my boys. You had my back then, and I’ve got yours now.’

  Watching Jason’s life disintegrate in front of his eyes had been truly horrible, like watching a motorway pile-up happen in real time. It was five years since we had sat in this bar, at this very same table, my friend thunderstruck with the sudden knowledge that his marriage was over.

  ‘You don’t owe me anything, Jason.’

  ‘That’s bollocks and you know it.’

  I swallowed down on the lump in my throat, keeping my eyes on the table. ‘Cheers, mate. Appreciate it.’

  He pushed one of the full pint glasses towards me but I held up a hand. I had barely even touched my first one.

  ‘I’m going easy at the moment, need to keep a clear head. You have it.’