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  TROLL

  D.B. Thorne has worked as a writer for the last 15 years, originally in advertising, then in television and radio comedy. He has written material for many comedians, including Jimmy Carr, Alan Carr, David Mitchell and Bob Mortimer. He was a major contributor to the BAFTA-winning Armstrong and Miller Show, and has worked on shows including Facejacker, Harry and Paul and Alan Carr: Chatty Man. Troll is his fourth novel.

  Also by D.B. Thorne

  East of Innocence

  Nothing Sacred

  Promises of Blood

  TROLL

  D.B. THORNE

  Published in trade paperback and e-book in Great Britain in 2017

  by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © D.B. Thorne, 2017

  The moral right of D.B. Thorne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 594 2

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 595 9

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  one

  FORTUNE LOOKED AT THE MAN IN CHARGE OF FINDING HIS missing daughter with the kind of dismay he generally reserved for the most dismally incompetent interview candidates. This was the man responsible for piecing together her final movements? Chasing down leads and taking names? Overweight, crumpled, he had the look of somebody who’d suddenly found himself in charge of his own washing and ironing. In his recent past, Fortune guessed, was a failed marriage and a whole lot of takeaways.

  Looking at him over the interview room table, Fortune had a feeling close to panic. He blinked and said, ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Scaled it back,’ said Marsh. He had little eyes and they weren’t looking at Fortune; were looking anywhere but. ‘No choice.’

  ‘But she’s still missing,’ said Fortune.

  Marsh nodded. ‘I know. I’m sorry. But it’s been weeks, and there’s still no …’ He stopped. Body, thought Fortune. You mean body, but you haven’t got the guts to say it. Marsh coughed. ‘We’re not closing the investigation. Just … reclassifying it.’

  ‘Reclassifying it,’ repeated Fortune. ‘What does that even mean?’ It sounded to him like the kind of empty phrase his younger staff used: moving the needle, taking it offline, reaching out. Air, nothing more. It didn’t make sense.

  ‘Mr Fortune,’ Marsh said. ‘You’re upset. It’s understandable.’

  ‘Of course it’s understandable,’ said Fortune. ‘She’s my daughter. She’s disappeared off the face of the earth. And you’ve got no leads, no ideas, no nothing. And now you’re giving up?’ He tried, but he couldn’t quite keep the desperation out of his voice.

  ‘Not giving up. Re—’

  ‘Reclassifying. I heard. I still don’t know what it means.’

  ‘It means …’ Marsh sighed. ‘Mr Fortune, we’re trying to find your daughter.’

  ‘Not very hard.’

  ‘As hard as resources will allow.’

  ‘How many resources does a missing girl merit?’ said Fortune. ‘How important is her life? Ten policemen? Four? One?’

  Marsh sat back in his chair, massaged the bridge of his nose. He had thin hair, grey. He couldn’t be in charge, running the show, thought Fortune. His daughter deserved better.

  ‘Mr Fortune, we’ve done what we can. Thrown bodies at the investigation, set up an incident room, knocked on doors, interviewed friends, ex-boyfriends, colleagues. We’ve spoken to the press, put out an appeal. CCTV, the lot.’ He lifted his shoulders. ‘Nothing. At this point, there’s just not much more we can do. Without …’ Again he didn’t say the word. Body. Without the body of my only child, my daughter. Sophie.

  ‘You can’t give up on her,’ said Fortune.

  ‘We’re not giving up. We’re scaling back. No choice.’

  ‘How many people have you got on it? Right now?’

  Marsh picked up a pen, something to look at rather than Fortune. ‘Right now, Mr Fortune, we have one officer continuing with enquiries. The investigation isn’t closed. But, like I say, it’s been scaled back.’

  ‘One. One officer.’ Fortune closed his eyes for several seconds. He had come a long way. Taken time off. ‘What can one officer do? She’s out there somewhere, and she needs help.’ He could hear a pleading tone in his voice, imploring. God, but he sounded desperate.

  ‘Mr Fortune,’ said Marsh, ‘what do you think happened to your daughter?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ said Fortune. ‘To find out.’

  ‘No. I mean, when you heard that she had gone missing, what was your immediate thought?’

  Fortune shook his head. ‘I don’t know. That she’d … I don’t know.’

  ‘That she’d what?’ said Marsh.

  Fortune shrugged, trying to keep calm. ‘Gone on holiday. Run off with a new boyfriend. I don’t know. Could’ve been anything.’

  Marsh nodded, leant back in his chair. They sat facing each other and Fortune could hear the hum of the air conditioner, hum and rattle, a world away from the sleek, smooth hiss of his Dubai office.

  There was a knock on the door and a young woman came in with two coffees, put them on the table. Marsh nodded to her and she left, closed the door with a gentle click. He lifted one of the Styrofoam cups, took a drink, made a face. He put the cup down carefully, slowly.

  ‘How many times did your daughter attempt suicide?’

  There it was. The question Fortune had been expecting, waiting for. The question he didn’t want to face. He remembered hospital corridors, hard seats, his wife next to him, the click of heels on linoleum. The slow tick of a wall clock, more than one clock, more than one hospital.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

  ‘We’re not ruling anything out,’ said Marsh. ‘But given her history …’

  Fortune wished Marsh had the courage to finish his sentences. To tell it like it was. That his daughter had had a troubled adolescence, all the way through her late teens and early twenties; that she had been moody, anxious, depressed, angry. Lost.

  ‘She’d been better,’ he said. ‘Much better. A different person.’

  No more suicide attempts. No more pills, flatmates finding her after coming back from a late bar shift. No more ambulances, vigils, apologies, tears. She had been better, making a life for herself, or at least that was what he’d been told.

  Marsh sighed and opened a file that he had brought with him, placed it on the table between them. It was beige and thin. If this was it, Fortune thought, the sum total of the investigation, then a lot of midnight oil had gone unburned. Marsh took out a clear plastic wallet with a piece of paper inside, using two fingers to slide it into place between the pair of them.

  ‘We found this,’ he said, turning it so that Fortune could read. An A4 sheet of paper, covered in scribbles. Fragments of phrases in black pen, haphazardly placed. This needs to end, underlined many times. This ends today, the words gone over a
gain and again so that the ink shone and the paper was indented, almost worn through. Can’t go on. Can’t go on. Can’t go on. In block capitals, at the bottom of the paper, this time carefully printed: WHY SHOULD I TAKE ANY MORE?

  Fortune looked at the writing, the flourishes on the tails of the gs and ys, the to-hell-with-you freedom of it. It was Sophie’s writing, no mistaking it.

  ‘What is this?’ he said.

  ‘We found it on your daughter’s desk,’ said Marsh. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Fortune looked at it again. It wasn’t conclusive, it couldn’t be. ‘This doesn’t mean anything,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Marsh. ‘But given her history …’ Again, again, he left the sentence hanging, reached forward and took a drink of his coffee, eyes anywhere but on Fortune.

  ‘This isn’t a suicide note,’ said Fortune.

  ‘Mr Fortune, your daughter had a history of suicide attempts. She disappeared and nobody knows where she went. There is no body. She had no enemies. Her lifestyle was … unconventional. I’ve read her blog. This is London. It gets to people, particularly young people. Big cities can feel very lonely.’

  There was another knock on the door and a young policeman pushed it open a fraction, put his head into the room and lifted his chin to summon Marsh. Marsh pushed his chair back, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and left, pulling the door closed behind him.

  Fortune looked down at his daughter’s handwriting, tried to picture her face. How long since he had seen her? Months. He could barely remember her, could better remember her as a child. She had been beautiful, that he could recall. He could remember her weight as he tossed her into the air and caught her, delighted eyes sparkling in the sun. Laughter. His daughter, before he lost her, before her happiness was replaced by something dark and alien that Fortune could not understand or connect with. Before she had given up on him. Or he had given up on her.

  He closed his eyes, tried to sit comfortably. It felt as if he had spent the last day being passed from one air-conditioned environment to another, a dreamlike journey completely unrelated to the real, living world outside. Watching the desert sands of Dubai’s outskirts unreel past him from the cool interior of the company’s Mercedes. Reading the paper in the perfect ambient temperature of the airport lounge. Onto the plane, back out at Heathrow and into another Mercedes, an older model than the company’s but air-conditioned nonetheless. Dropped at the hotel, then here, an off-green interview room in a dilapidated suburb of London, blighted by cardboard and polystyrene tossed in the wind. He was tired and he did not want this to be happening, none of it. Did not want this to be real.

  Marsh came back into the room, apologized and sat down again. Fortune watched him impassively. Marsh took a deep breath.

  ‘Mr Fortune,’ he said. ‘I am sorry, I really am. I don’t want you to think this case is closed. But if I’m to be honest, I think both you and I know that your daughter was troubled, and that the most plausible explanation for her disappearance is that she took her own life.’

  Fortune had to give Marsh credit; he’d managed to get to the end of that sentence, difficult as it must have been to say.

  ‘So that’s it?’

  ‘No, Mr Fortune, that’s not it. But we’ve done all we can. If there are any further developments, then of course we’ll assign more resources. But for now, we’re out of options. And we have other cases. Many other cases.’

  Fortune sat in silence until he realized that, as far as Marsh was concerned, this meeting was over. He had travelled two thousand miles, taken days off work, to be told that his trip had been wasted and that his daughter was, in all probability, dead. He stood up.

  ‘Who’s your manager?’

  Marsh just shook his head. ‘It won’t help.’

  ‘It can’t be … You can’t just leave it. One officer? It’s not right. She’s my daughter.’ So empty, his words. So needy. He felt ashamed of himself.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Marsh.

  ‘I don’t think you are,’ said Fortune. ‘I don’t think you care at all.’

  Marsh looked at his watch. ‘We’re going to have to finish here.’

  The public sector, thought Fortune. It was everything they said it was. The monkeys put in charge, the blind leading the blind, the lunatics running the asylum. He ran out of metaphors. He shook his head. There was nobody out there looking for his daughter. Nobody.

  Marsh picked up the thin file, stood up, walked past Fortune and opened the door. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, once again. Again Fortune had a feeling of panic, as if, were he to leave this room, any chance his daughter had of being found would be gone. At last he stood up and walked to the door. He should have looked after her. Been there for her. It wasn’t this policeman’s fault. It was his, his and his alone.

  He walked past Marsh without looking at him, not as a show of contempt, but because he didn’t want the policeman to see the shame and guilt in his eyes.

  Outside the police station, the weather was cold, even though it was spring, or meant to be. Fortune felt every expat’s momentary incredulity that the people of Britain stayed here, here in this country of decaying infrastructure and eroding values and soul-sapping weather. He looked for a cab, but this part of London, way out east, wasn’t a black cabbie’s turf of choice.

  He lit a cigarette, cupping his hand around the flame, took in a lungful with his eyes closed, waiting for the nicotine to do its thing. He coughed, tried to stop, coughed some more. That used to be another thing about Dubai: you could smoke anywhere, not like here. He stood smoking on the pavement, watching immigrants walk past as if it were they, rather than him, who belonged on these streets. A man with a tattooed face and crutches asked him for money to get a hostel for the night. Fortune put his hand in a pocket, remembered he’d spent his last British money on a coffee at the airport.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing left.’

  He watched a cyclist overtake a minicab and swear at the driver as he passed. He watched a Middle Eastern man step outside his convenience store and stand, arms folded across his chest, facing the world with pride. He watched a young woman push a pram while swearing at somebody down a mobile phone. Eventually a taxi arrived and Fortune gave the driver the name of his hotel, upscale, five star, where people understood the rules, how things worked.

  two

  SO WHAT I’D LIKE TO KNOW IS, SINCE WHEN HAS IT BEEN OKAY to pay a thousand pounds a month to rent a flat when said flat a) doesn’t have heating that actually, you know, heats, and b) has no light on the entrance stairs, so at night I’ve got a good chance of falling over and breaking something important (like my iPhone).

  I called Sam and asked him pretty much this question, and he told me that he’d see to it, that it was on his list. I asked him how long his list was. He replied by saying, ‘How long is my what?’ and laughing. That, I think, pretty much sums him up.

  But then he said, and I’m still turning this over in my head, he said that there’d been complaints about me.

  ‘What kind of complaints?’ I asked him.

  ‘Noise.’

  ‘What noise?’

  Sam sighed, like he’d heard it all before. But I was serious, I haven’t made any noise, definitely haven’t. Let’s be honest, it’s not as if I have enough friends to invite over and make noise with

  ‘Music,’ Sam said. ‘Loud music, on all night. I’ve had a couple of complaints.’

  ‘I haven’t made any noise,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you haven’t. Still, though, you know … keep it down.’

  ‘I told you. I haven’t been making any noise, and certainly not at night. Who complained?’

  ‘Dunno. Got a message, left on my phone.’

  ‘I haven’t been making noise,’ I said again. What else could I say? There wasn’t much point in arguing; Sam had obviously made up his mind. ‘Anyway,’ I went on, ‘it’s freezing. Can you please sort the heating out?’

  Sam said, ‘Tell you what. You ke
ep the noise down, I’ll put you at the top of my list. Deal?’

  He wasn’t even pretending to entertain the slight possibility that I was telling the truth. Even though I was paying him a thousand pounds a month to stay in a cold, dark dump. You know what I said?

  ‘Okay.’

  But honestly, right then I didn’t have time to argue, because I was standing outside a bar called Mingles and hoping that the young lady I’d arranged to meet there had showed up. Because if she was there, and if what she had to tell me was true, then my career as a journalist would be looking up. And I’d be able to move to another flat, one with heating and working lights and maybe even a new television.

  The young lady – no names – had told me what she looked like, and she wasn’t hard to spot. She’d told me that she was tall and quite pretty, which was close; she was actually tall and stunning. She was also quite clearly only about fifteen, although that hadn’t stopped the barman from selling her a bottle of lager. It was quite likely that he’d fallen in love with her, as she looked, well, awesome. She was perched on a bar stool, and her legs nearly reached the floor.

  I asked her if she was who I thought she was, and she said yes, yes she was. So then I said, look, I’m sorry, but I can’t talk to you here. You’re underage, and you’re drinking. We need to keep this legitimate, all above board. She rolled her eyes and sighed, as teenagers do, and I hoped she wasn’t going to make this difficult.

  Let me cut a long story short: she’s fifteen, and a well-known TV celebrity slept with her and offered her drugs, even though he knew how old she was. I’m a journalist. It’s a story. And I need to keep her onside, until the story breaks.

  ‘Can I buy you a coffee?’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t finished this.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Make this easy on me. Please?’

  There was more eye-rolling, and an extra-long sigh, and then she said, ‘Okay.’ I can’t help but like teenagers. They’ll try to get away with anything, but the good ones don’t mind getting busted. She slid off the bar stool like water poured out of a glass and looked down at me, and I’m not short.