Troll Read online

  Ten minutes. Ten minutes to work it out, he said, or you won’t get your clothes back. Do you understand the rules?

  Yes, I said.

  And he went.

  On the wall were six words:

  Intoxication.

  Immodesty.

  Adultery.

  Gluttony.

  Wrath.

  Murder.

  And underneath them:

  What should come next?

  Okay. Here we are again, I thought. Here we are again, and you are going to get your clothes back. You won’t let him humiliate you. This is about power, about him showing you he can do anything he wants to you. Don’t let him. Think.

  The thing is, the troll might know everything about me, but I’m starting to get a handle on him too. He thinks that knowledge equals power, and that’s the key to the puzzle. Knowledge is his weapon, which means that these games rely on knowledge about me. The solution to this game involves something I’ve done, or something I am. It’s just a question of working it out.

  My first thought was: it’s the seven deadly sins. Only I was pretty sure intoxication wasn’t in there. I knew sloth was, because when I was a kid I used to wonder what an animal was doing in the list. And envy, envy was definitely in there. So it wasn’t the deadly sins. Dismiss it. Move on.

  Was it something I’d done myself? Intoxication? Tick. Immodesty? Tick. Adultery? No, I couldn’t say that I’d committed that, unless one of the men I’d slept with was married, which I didn’t think they were, and anyway, it was a bit of a stretch. Gluttony? Certainly. Wrath? Yep. Murder? I could definitely rule that one out. I was sure I’d have noticed.

  So. What else? I knew that time was ticking, but I would not panic. I would not. I would think and concentrate and work it out.

  Intoxication.

  Immodesty.

  Adultery.

  Gluttony.

  Wrath.

  Murder.

  What should come next?

  That’s the key to it, I thought. What should come next. Not ‘what comes next’, but ‘what should come next’. Meaning that it didn’t, but it should.

  Gotcha. It hit me, from where I don’t know, but I saw adultery and gluttony, and the thought came into my head and I looked at the other categories, and yes, I thought, it must be. It must be.

  Intoxication. J.P., a well-known and usually squeaky-clean member of a boy band, falls out of a nightclub, hammered, seriously off his head on booze and powder. He climbs into a taxi and the driver’s having none of it, so J.P. swings at him, in front of the cameras of half a dozen paparazzi.

  Immodesty. C.C., a TV presenter in the mix for hosting a prime-time Saturday-night family show, has shots of her naked self leaked all over the internet. Goodbye lucrative TV contract, hello D-list personal appearances in Essex nightclubs.

  Adultery. Cabinet minister has it off with his secretary. Yawn.

  Gluttony. H.T.D., rapper and all-round bad boy, piles on the pounds to the point that all he can now wear are tracksuits and hats.

  Wrath. H.T.D., portly rapper, beats up his girlfriend.

  Murder. R.L., model, has abortion. Tastefully reported, with a moral angle about a woman’s right to choose. But, basically, a scandal piece. Not my finest hour.

  Those were the last six stories I wrote for the magazine, the last six stories that carried my byline. Oh, I’m an expert in sin, a student of it. And what should come next? That cradle-snatching bastard Charlie Jackson, that’s what, only he got away with it. Got completely away with it.

  What should come next? Paedophilia? It didn’t sound right. Perversion? No. It had to sound biblical, like in the Commandments or something. Lust. It was lust. Lust should come next. I knocked on the door, banged on it. Lust, I shouted. It’s lust. It’s Charlie Jackson and it’s lust. And the troll came back, and he sounded disappointed, and he said, yes, that’s right. He told me to put the hood on and he opened the door and tossed in my clothes, and he dragged me back to my cell and threw me into it, like I’d ruined his day, like he despised me.

  Like he despised me. Sophie, grow up. He’s destroyed your life, kidnapped you, starved and humiliated you, and he’s going to kill you. Of course he fucking despises you.

  forty

  NEXT ON THE LIST WAS A MS S. EMMERSON. SHE LIVED DOWN A rutted lane between two terraces, in a house that looked as if it had started life as a shed and had had other buildings attached to it over time, a confusing jumble of lean-tos and corrugated iron and painted brick walls, a gravel and weed apron in front of it where a convertible VW Beetle was parked, looking like it wouldn’t be going anywhere soon. Fortune knocked on what he guessed was the front door and waited. A cat squeezed fluidly out of a hole in the Beetle’s roof and mewed at him, looking at Fortune as if he held some kind of answer, which he didn’t. The door was opened by a woman with short silver hair, wearing a paint-covered T-shirt.

  ‘Help you?’

  ‘Hello. Yes, I’m doing some research into the Emmerson family.’

  ‘Oh?’ The woman had half-moon glasses on a chain around her neck and she put them on. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions.’

  The woman leant against her door frame and looked Fortune up and down. ‘What kind of questions?’

  ‘Just about your descendants, people in your family.’

  ‘Genealogy,’ said the woman.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Fortune, smiling, trying a laugh. ‘Some people don’t understand the word, that’s why I don’t use it.’

  ‘I’m with you,’ said the woman, though she didn’t smile back, instead watched Fortune with a level gaze. ‘So what would you like to know?’

  ‘Do you have a daughter, or a niece, or any relation really, called Claudia?’

  ‘Claudia?’

  ‘Yes. She’s, well, she’s kind of the starting point of my research.’

  ‘What kind of research?’

  Fortune searched for a plausible answer, though he knew as much about genealogy as he did parenting. The woman pushed herself upright and said, again, ‘What kind of research?’

  ‘Like I said.’ Fortune paused, then added, ‘Just general genealogy.’ He almost winced as he said it, aware of how lame it sounded.

  The woman cocked her head, one way, then the other, like a small bird sizing up a worm. ‘Who are you?’ she said.

  Fortune backed up a couple of steps, but he needed to know, needed an answer from this woman. ‘Claudia, that’s the name. Do you—’

  ‘Are you that man?’ she asked him. ‘From the news?’

  Fortune didn’t answer, just turned around and walked back down the rutted lane, as quickly as he could without looking as if he was running away, which he was. From behind him he heard the woman call, ‘You are, aren’t you? You’re that man,’ but by this time he’d turned the corner into the street where his car was parked. He still had one name left to try, and if Ms S. Emmerson was going to the police, he’d better work fast.

  *

  The last name on Fortune’s list was a T. Emmerson. He had the address but, he now realized, not a good enough story. He thought back to the woman, and how inadequate his explanation had been, how flimsy. His off-the-shelf genealogy cover wasn’t doing it, wasn’t cutting it. He needed something that closed down questions instead of encouraging them. Why do you want to know about Claudia? Because I’m doing research into the Emmerson name. Why? That was what anybody who knew her would ask him, and right now he didn’t have an answer. He sat in his car and thought. Money. That was it. Claudia still owed money of some kind, and Fortune was out to get it. A bailiff, he was a bailiff. A debt collector. He imagined that he would have made a pretty good debt collector, though that wasn’t a lot to brag about. Cold, businesslike, incapable of empathy. Not a person anybody could like. So okay. He’s a debt collector and he’s after some money, a twenty-year-old debt, the kind of thing people don’t want to know too much about. The kind of th
ing people prefer just to disappear. He’d spout some legal mumbo-jumbo about unpaid estate, lasting legacy, compound interest. That’d do it. Claudia had died owing money and the debt had caught up. Cynical? Yes, very. But it would probably work.

  T. Emmerson lived in a fifties house, the kind built by the government in haste, the kind nobody imagined would still be there in seventy years’ time. It still had an unfinished look, as if it was waiting for somebody to come and render it, apply an extra coat of paint. The front garden had a gate, curled metal painted green, and there was a motorbike that looked almost as unloved as the lawn did. It was exactly the kind of place that Fortune had worked his entire life to distance himself from, to rise above. He pushed the gate open, walked up the cracked path and knocked on the door. He waited, then knocked again. He stepped back and looked up at the windows of the first floor, but as he did so, the door opened and a man said, ‘What?’

  ‘Mr Emmerson?’

  ‘Last time I checked,’ the man said. He was wearing a vest and had thick-lensed glasses and stubble and doughy white arms. He looked old and unwell. Hell, he probably looked like Fortune did. Those in glass houses, et cetera.

  ‘My name’s …’ Christ, he hadn’t considered that one. ‘Thomas.’ First or second name? Who knew? ‘I work for a debt recovery firm.’

  The man had one hand on the frame of his door and he leant his forehead against the back of it, lifted his head, butted his hand. ‘Not again.’

  ‘It concerns a …’ Fortune pulled out the phone, pretended to read something from it. ‘Claudia Emmerson.’

  The man turned his head at this and stood up properly. ‘Claudia?’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘I did. She was my sister.’

  ‘I need to speak with her.’

  ‘You know she’s been dead for, I don’t know …’ He closed his eyes, did a mental calculation, took his time over it, which led Fortune to suspect that maths hadn’t been his thing at school. ‘Twenty years. More.’

  ‘Oh. Really? That’s information I wasn’t aware of.’ Fortune jabbed at his phone in a ludicrous parody of an official in possession of an important device that did complex things. ‘Then I’ll need to know the next of kin.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the debt needs paying, and if Claudia Emmerson really is dead …’ Fortune paused at this point, to suggest that he was by no means convinced by this claim, ‘then the debt will naturally revert to the next of kin.’ Which, he was well aware, was nonsense. But by the looks of Mr T. Emmerson, he had no idea of how the law worked, or didn’t.

  ‘Shit. Serious? Shit. I mean, I don’t know. What does that mean, the next of kin?’

  ‘Normally a husband.’

  ‘Didn’t have one.’

  ‘Parents?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Siblings?’

  ‘Do what?’

  Fortune sighed. ‘Brothers or sisters?’

  The man paused. ‘Well, there’s me.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right,’ said Fortune. ‘I see.’ He stopped, laughed. ‘Of course, there’s children, too. I got it in the wrong order. Children first, then brothers and sisters. So if she had a child—’

  ‘She did,’ the man said, quickly.

  ‘Oh? I don’t have any record of that.’

  ‘No, well, she … It wasn’t like … he wasn’t exactly normal.’

  ‘Not normal?’

  ‘Well, by that I mean he seemed okay, but see, it wasn’t like she and the dad, they weren’t together. And course, then she dies, doesn’t she, kills herself, and then the kid, I mean what’s going to happen to him, my parents are old, and me, me? I, no, it ain’t going to happen. So off he goes, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Does he?’ Fortune took a step back, jabbed again at his phone.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where?’ said Fortune, still looking at his phone, not daring to look at the man, show the hope and need in his eyes.

  ‘Don’t know. Off he goes. You know?’

  ‘You didn’t ask?’ Now he looked up at the man, who seemed uneasy.

  ‘Well, I mean. What am I going to do?’

  ‘Got a name for him?’ said Fortune, aware that this was it, this was the moment. Win or lose. Heads or tails.

  ‘The kid? Yeah, he was called … wait.’ The man took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes, thought. ‘No, weren’t that. He was called … like, a weird name. That much I remember.’

  ‘Please think.’

  ‘Yeah, am doing. Thing is, he weren’t here, I didn’t really know him. And Claudia, she weren’t exactly what you’d call mum of the year either. Still, used to scream at him. What was it? Bloody shut up, bloody … Hector. That was it. Kid was called Hector. What about that?’

  ‘And you don’t know where he is?’

  ‘Not a clue.’

  ‘Because if I can’t find him, then that debt? It reverts to you.’

  The man put his glasses back on and said, ‘Listen, if I did, seriously, I’d tell you.’

  Fortune didn’t doubt it. ‘All right. So all you can tell me is that your sister, Claudia Emmerson, had a child named Hector Emmerson, and that you have no idea where he is.’

  ‘Erm,’ said the man, trying to process what Fortune had just said. ‘Yeah. No. Don’t know where he is. Right?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Fortune. ‘I might be back. If I can’t find him.’ He turned and walked back down the path to the gate, but when he was halfway, the man called out.

  ‘How much? How much, if you need it paid?’

  Fortune turned, looked at the man, the shabby home, thought of the lack of effort and care he had shown to his sister, his sister’s son.

  ‘Just shy of a hundred and sixty million dollars,’ he said. ‘Have you got that kind of money?’ He turned without waiting to see the man’s reaction, opened the gate, closed it, and walked back to his car. He had a name. It was something. It was infinitely more than he’d had a day ago. But there were only four days left. There was so much work to do, so much. He wondered whether he could do it; not whether he could out-think the troll, but whether, if he kept on going like this, he would still be alive. He wanted to sleep. He couldn’t drive back to the caravan park. He needed to sleep, now. So badly.

  forty-one

  UNLESS THE HECTOR EMMERSON THAT HE WAS LOOKING FOR was a dairy farmer living in Iowa, then Fortune believed that he’d found his son. His son, whom he had neglected even more completely than he had his daughter. What kind of legacy was he leaving? The most shameful kind. The most ignominious, worthless, wretched kind. Enough, he told himself. Don’t think about it. Act, don’t think. It’s Sophie that matters. Everything else is just noise, incoherence, madness. Sophie, concentrate on Sophie. You’ve got three days. You haven’t got time to feel sorry for yourself.

  He’d woken up five hours earlier in the front seat of Lee’s mother’s car, in a lay-by off an A road, parked between an HGV out of Poland and a fast-food van selling deep-fried heart attacks. He’d bought a bacon sandwich from the unhealthy-looking woman behind the counter, bacon sandwiches, it turned out, being one thing he could still manage, apparently cancer-proof. He’d eaten sitting in the front seat of the car, the door open, blankly watching trucks and vans and cars hiss past on the wet road. Cars passing, time passing. Three days left. He needed to move. And to do that, he’d need to keep the car. He dialled Lee’s number. He had to buy some time.

  ‘Lee?’

  ‘Yeah.’ His voice thick and slow, from drink, drugs, maybe both. ‘Where you at, man?’

  ‘I’m sorry. The car’s taking longer than I thought.’

  ‘Oh.’ There was a long pause as Lee tried to think of a response. ‘How come?’

  ‘Because when you crashed it, you also fried the central locking. Totally. It needs replacing.’

  ‘Oh no, man. No, I ain’t got money for that.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Like I said, this ca
r guy, he’s a friend of mine. I’ll get it sorted, but it’s going to take time.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A couple of days.’

  ‘My mum’s back in, like, three days, man. I need that car.’

  ‘Trust me. You’ll get it.’ Fortune needed to handle Lee’s anxiety, and decided that attack was the best strategy. It made him feel guilty as hell, but what choice did he have? He needed the car, needed it to find Sophie. ‘I’m doing you a favour here. If you want me to bring it back now, I’ll do it. And leave the explaining to you.’

  ‘No, man, no.’ Lee couldn’t get the words out fast enough. Fortune imagined Lee’s mother. She must be a formidable woman, to instil this much fear in young Lee. ‘Just bring it back before she gets here, yeah?’

  ‘No problem. I’ll call you.’ Fortune paused, imagined Lee’s anxiety. Poor kid. ‘And Lee?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Don’t worry. Really. It’ll be fine. I promise.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Fortune had hung up, driven to a roadside restaurant with Wi-Fi and searched for Hector Emmerson. He only came up with two, one in the States, the other in the UK, a software engineer who worked at a place called AIX Industries. He looked them up and found an address in east London, not so far from where his daughter had been living and working. Could finding his son be this easy?

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Fortune glanced up from his seat in the café of the service station at a young woman who was looking down at him with concern. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You … you’ve got blood on your shirt.’

  He looked down and saw stains, dark on the pale material. He’d only seen himself in his rear-view mirror that day, only his eyes. He excused himself, closed his daughter’s computer and walked to the toilets. He stared at himself in the mirror. He was pale and his lips were cracked and bloody, his beard matted below his mouth. He was unrecognisable, which he had to concede wasn’t the worst news. Jesus but he looked ill, his eyes dark, deep in their sockets. He smiled at his reflection, a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, a smile that made him look like a ghastly wraith come to visit evil on some unfortunate.