Chapter 44
Back upstairs in the operations room, I phoned the warehouse to verify that Levchenko had indeed got that far and collected his order, then spent a few minutes studying my road map.
The place was north-east of the city, out in the sticks. His house was in the countryside too, but closer in. The area between was within our potential search area and had, according to the reports, already been visited. That didn’t mean something hadn’t been missed.
Okay. Making the assumption that Levchenko wouldn’t have taken some crazy route, I drew a vertical eye shape on the map, with his house and the warehouse at the corners. Looking at the space in between, I could see two likely networks of roads he might have cycled along.
‘What are you doing?’ Laura said, putting a coffee down.
‘I’m thinking.’
She peered at the map.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Missing persons report. This is where he was last seen; this is where he was going.’
I rubbed my jaw. It would take me half an hour each way, starting from his house and heading to the warehouse along one set of roads, then back again down the other.
Levchenko hadn’t been missing that long in the grand scheme of things, and I wasn’t convinced anything had happened to him. But it was too … coincidental.
The birthday puzzle came back to me. Just because I had a connection to the guy didn’t mean anything. Sooner or later, by the law of averages, those kinds of connection would arise. It probably didn’t mean anything at all. Like the mention of Buxton, it was just the past intruding by chance.
‘Andy?’
‘We’ve already searched most of this area,’ I said. ‘It’s probably nothing.’
‘Right. So … what?’
I didn’t say anything. I could still picture him. Levchenko. From memory, he was a good man – not the sort to stay out and worry his wife. And then, of course, I remembered Emmeline. A black and white image. A face with one eye bruised shut.
I stood up. ‘I’ll go.’
‘You sure?’ Laura shook her head. ‘Hang on. What’s going on, Hicks?’
‘The woman,’ I said. ‘We’ve met before. Or rather, I’ve met her husband before. Look, it doesn’t really matter. But I’ll just check it out. It’s probably nothing, but I’ll check it out anyway, just to be sure.’
‘O-kay.’ Laura spread the word out, looking at me.
You’re being weird here, Hicks.
‘Because I owe it to them,’ I said.
I owe it to them.
Eight years ago, Gregor Levchenko had come to me asking for help, and I’d failed him. Failed him and his wife and – most of all – his daughter, Emmeline.
At the time, she was living with a man called John Doherty, who had attacked her. I’d told her father the truth: that if she wasn’t prepared to co-operate with us, there wasn’t a whole lot we’d be able to do. Two days later, Doherty had beaten Emmeline Levchenko to death.
Because of me.
Because I failed to do my job and protect her.
On the way to the long, winding Hawthorne Road on the outskirts of town, I drove past Gregor Levchenko’s house and found myself stopping outside.
It was two up, two down, with windows like black eyes. Little more than a shack: a patched-together cube of brickwork and corrugated iron. The land around it was hard-scrabble: dust and dirt and miserable clutches of yellowing grass. Chickens from the property next door pecked at the gravel.
It looked like a place where nobody lived anymore, but they did, the pair of them.
And this was where Emmeline had grown up.
They had been a decent, hard-working family who had never expected anything more from life than that the people who were supposed to look after and protect them would do so.
It wasn’t so much to ask. It shouldn’t have been.
I owed them, all right.
And there was that sense again – stronger than ever – of being entangled. Of chains of cause and effect I could only glimpse brief links in, but which held taut out of sight. The sense that what was happening now was, at least in part, the present unable to keep the secrets of the past.
Everything unfolds.