Then You Were Gone. Claire Moss
was not his boss in any direct sense of the word, but ultimately he paid his wages, although Jazzy would probably have been terrified to be caught napping by him even if the power roles were reversed.
‘Sorry,’ Jazzy said, rubbing his eyes. ‘Bad night with Rory last night.’
Keith nodded politely but uninterestedly. Despite having fathered four children of his own, he never displayed any interest in Jazzy’s family life. ‘Still no Joe?’ He did not sound concerned.
Jazzy ran his tongue around his fur-lined mouth. ‘Um… No. Still nothing. You’re probably right, he’s probably decided to take a bit of time off. He’s owed some, you know the hours he’s been working lately.’
‘Yeah, the boy deserves a break,’ Keith said absently and he continued leafing through the pile of post he had brought into the office with him. ‘Don’t you fancy a bit of the same yourself? A bit of R&R with the wife and nipper? You can get some cheap deals this time of year, why don’t you take a bit of time off too? You look like you could do with a rest.’
This was the most fake Jazzy had ever heard Keith sound. Those words were absolutely, one hundred percent the opposite of the kind of thing Keith would normally say. Keith didn’t believe in holidays, he didn’t believe in resting, he didn’t believe in spending time with one’s family, and he certainly didn’t believe in being nice to people, especially to Jazzy. And anyway, Jazzy reiterated to himself, he’s not my boss. If I want to take some time off, I’ll bloody well take some time off, I don’t need him to tell me when to do it. ‘Nah,’ he said with studied casualness. ‘There’s too much needs doing here.’
‘OK,’ Keith looked at him with a little more interest. ‘Things been busy in the office have they? Many phone calls or anything? Any new clients? If Joe’s away, it might be as well to refer any of that stuff on to me, you know, any calls, emails, personal visitors.’
Jazzy did not recall ever having a customer show up at the Anastasia offices in person. Which was probably no bad thing, he reflected, seeing as it was essentially one room plus an entrance vestibule in a poxy serviced block in Tottenham. ‘No, not busy with customers, just… just some IT stuff that I’ve been working on.’ Keith never asked about Jazzy’s work and Jazzy never told him.
‘OK,’ Keith nodded, turning to go. ‘Well in that case then, why not take a few days off.’ When Jazzy did not respond, he said, ‘Well, it’s up to you. I just thought it might do you and the family good to get out of London for a bit.’
As Jazzy watched Keith disappear out of the office, he tried to decide, through the paranoid fog of sleep deprivation, whether or not Keith’s words had been a threat.
Simone had been standing across the road from Mack’s flat for nearly eight minutes, she calculated. Granted, she was at a bus stop so she did not look overtly bizarre, but two buses had passed by without her boarding them and she was going to have to do something soon to avoid drawing attention to herself.
It was not as though she would be breaking and entering; she had a key in her bag. Mack had given her a set of his keys a month ago, a profound and unexpected gesture that had filled Simone’s head with visions of something she had not dared allow herself to believe in before. A future that contained Mack – her and Mack, together. That was before the L-bomb text, before any of this, when the furthest ahead Simone felt able to plan was maybe a weekend away together over New Year.
She had never used the keys. If she stayed at Mack’s flat she arrived with him and left with him. She did not think Mack had ever really expected that she would use them. It was not the use of the keys that he had been giving her. He had been using the keys to tell her something that he was unable to say himself.
And she had never, under any circumstances, imagined that the first time she used the keys would be to sneak into Mack’s flat to rummage surreptitiously through his past.
Jazzy had phoned her the previous night sounding exhausted and frightened. Jazzy was not strong, nor was he brave. He refused to watch 18 certificate films or walk down back streets alone after dark. But Simone did not think she had heard him sound frightened like this before. ‘It’s something to do with Keith,’ he said, his voice heavy with defeat, and described the conversation he and Keith had had in the office.
Simone had felt a rush of panic. She did not like Keith. No normal person, she felt sure, could like Keith. Even Mack did not like Keith; she could tell from the way he acted around him, the fake persona he adopted of asking about golf handicaps and pretending to care about brake horsepower, always on edge as though waiting for some terrible backlash to come his way. And he was always reluctant to share things with Keith, to tell him even seemingly mundane details of his life. Simone was not even sure if Keith knew for definite that she and Mack were an item. It was as though Mack was worried Keith might one day use this kind of information against him. Mack still referred to him, in unguarded moments, as ‘Uncle Keith’, and Simone had put Mack’s willingness to spend time with a man who certainly dealt in cars of dubious provenance and illegally imported cigarettes, and probably had fingers in numerous even less savoury pies, down to the blind loyalty people feel to members of their family. Except Keith was no actual relation of Mack’s. He had known Mack all his life and was some kind of non-specific ‘family friend’, but Simone had not yet discovered on which side – Mack’s mother or his absentee father? Finding these things out had never mattered before. She had assumed she would find out the nature of Mack’s complicated relationship with Keith over time, or perhaps never. After all, she rarely needed to see the man; it was Mack and Jazzy, not she, who had gone into business with him, prostituting themselves to someone who only usually dealt in things on the very farthest side of legality, if not over the edge. It was Mack and Jazzy who ought to have asked themselves where Keith got all his money from in the first place before they had been willing to take any of that cash for themselves.
Mack’s flat was in a purpose-built block in one of the edgier parts of Dalston, and it was starting to get dark. Deciding she would rather be alone inside a flat that was not hers than alone on the street for any longer, Simone crossed over and typed the code into the door’s keypad.
She did not pass anyone else on the communal stairway and was relieved that nobody saw her unlock Mack’s front door. She could not shake this furtive feeling of being somewhere forbidden.
The inside of the flat was tidy, but no more so than usual. Simone had never managed to catch Mack out in terms of the presentability of his flat. Whatever time of day or week she had been round, whether he had been expecting her or not, everything, from his keys and wallet to his salt cellar and spaghetti spoon, was in its habitual place. ‘Just a spot of OCD,’ he had said self-deprecatingly when she first commented on the eerie tidiness. ‘We can’t all be slovenly artistic types who can’t find their Oyster card for all the piles of beautiful, hand-crafted tat everywhere.’ It was true, of course. Her flat was a tip and her Oyster card often went missing for days at a time. It had been beginning to worry Simone, before all this, before she actually had something proper to worry about, how she and Mack would cope if they ever did end up living together.
This flat had always seemed to Simone like an embodiment of the essence of Mack. Just as her flat was essentially Simone in converted Victorian terrace form – small, nice features, beautifully if unconventionally decorated but generally a bit scruffy – so Mack’s modern, clean-edged shrine to order in a rough-ish part of east London was indicative of the tight control he kept on all parts of his life underneath the earthy, common-touch exterior.
Simone was not sure where to start looking – or indeed what it was that she should be looking for. She and Jazzy had talked on into the night in endless circles, trying to exhaust all their options of what to do next, and ultimately concluding that one thing was resoundingly clear. They could not go to the police. Mack was not technically a missing person – he had written to them both only days ago, telling them of his intention to disappear. More to the point though, before he disappeared Mack had