Chapter 50 Laura
Laura
Laura stares from the passenger window of her car at the building on the opposite side of the road.
She absent-mindedly taps her fingernails against the door handle.
It’s midday and the upstairs curtains remain closed, which suggests he is either too lazy to open them or he worked long into the night and is catching up on sleep.
She dials his number, but like it has over the last six days, it goes straight to voicemail.
She has yet to leave a message. It’s frustrating, not knowing why he’s not answering.
Is he simply ghosting her? That’s what people are calling it nowadays, or so Laura’s youngest daughter told her when her eldest, Effie, stopped answering her calls.
Her patience worn thin, she exits her car, slamming the door shut.
‘Bloody fuckwit,’ she says aloud as she crosses the road and makes her way up a short driveway to his front door.
The front garden is unkempt, with an old leather armchair dumped in the centre of it.
She suspects Country Living magazine won’t be begging for a photo shoot here anytime soon.
No sound comes from the doorbell so she knocks three times. No answer. She looks over her shoulder to check she’s not being watched by a nosy neighbour, then slips around the side of the house towards the rear.
It’s as messy back here. It could be a scrapyard, with all these spare car parts littered about.
Again, there is no answer at the back door, so she takes a tissue from her pocket and uses it to turn the handle.
It opens. Careless, but unsurprising. He’s not struck her as a detail person.
Just as well in this case. She quietly lets herself in, leaving it slightly ajar should the need arise for a swift exit.
It’s happened twice now elsewhere, and luck won’t always be on her side.
She’s always had a heightened sense of smell, and her nose crinkles at the odours in here, a fetid combination of weed, barbecue-flavour pot noodles and, yes, the unmistakable tang of the regular masturbator. Laura spies a mobile phone lying on the kitchen table, which suggests he’s here.
‘Garry?’ she calls in something more than a speaking voice but less than a shout. Not a word in reply. She scans each room of the ground floor, hesitating at the bottom of the stairs. She’s reluctant to go up there in case an even worse stench is readying an assault on her nostrils.
‘Garry? Are you awake?’ she calls. Nothing. She sighs and climbs the stairs. A cautious sweep of two empty bedrooms and a filthy bathroom follows before she returns to the kitchen. ‘Where the hell are you?’
Nobody leaves the house anymore without their mobile, she thinks, but then she recalls she warned him not to take it on the job she assigned him. ‘If the shit hits the fan, it can be used to trace your movements,’ she warned.
But that was days ago. His continued silence suggests all hasn’t gone according to plan.
She switches his phone on but the battery is dead. The charger lies next to it so she plugs it into the socket and, after a wait of several minutes, it bursts into life. His code is, predictably, set to six zeros – probably as high as he can count. But she isn’t using him for his brain.
Curiosity takes hold and she scrolls through his phone.
He’s part of a few WhatsApp groups where like-minded Neanderthals share home-made pornographic video clips with each other.
The main thing is, she supposes, that he’s found his tribe.
Oh, no. Garry is featured in one video, and she can’t help but watch as he high-fives a fellow tattooed gorilla over the back of an unconscious woman they are top-and-tailing.
Laura might have some sympathy for the woman if she hadn’t been wearing such hideous knee-length, white PVC boots.
Scanning the rest of his messages, she’s pleased to see he has followed her advice and erased all correspondence between them. Then she deletes the logs of all her calls.
An app on his home screen catches her eye.
It’s called Find My Car Key. She glances out of the window and realises there’s no sign of his vehicle, a garish purple Vauxhall Astra she remembers he souped up with styling kits and a chrome exhaust. He really is the man that taste sidestepped.
She opens the app and doesn’t have to wait long before it pinpoints to the nearest ten metres where the keys, and he, most likely are.
She’s puzzled when she recognises the address.
The car is parked beneath Damon’s block of flats.