Lost

Keebal is on a roll. “We don't live in a perfect world and we don't have perfect police officers, eh? But what do they expect? We have no fucking resources and we're fighting a system that lets criminals out quicker than we can catch them. And all this new-age touchy-feely waa-waa bullshit they pass off as crime prevention has done nothing for you and me. And it's done nothing for the poor misguided kids who get caught up in crime.

“A while back I went to a conference and some lard-arse criminologist with an American accent told us that police officers had no enemies. ‘Criminals are not the enemy, crime is,' he said. Jesus wept! Have you ever heard anything so stupid? I had to stop myself giving this guy a slap.”

Keebal leans in a little closer. I smell peanuts on his breath.

“I don't blame coppers for being pissed off. And I can understand when they pocket a little for themselves, as long as they're not dealing drugs or hurting children, eh?” He puts his hand on my shoulder. “I can help you. Just tell me what happened that night.”

“I don't remember.”

“Am I correct in assuming, therefore, you cannot identify the person who shot you?”

“You would be correct in that assumption.”

My sarcasm seems to light a fire under Keebal. He knows I'm not buying his we're-all-alone-in-the-trenches bullshit.

“Where are the diamonds?”

“What diamonds?”

He tries to change the subject.

“No. No. Stop! What diamonds?”

He shouts over me. “The decks of that boat were swimming in blood. People died but we haven't found any bodies and nobody has been reported missing. What does that suggest to you?”

He makes me think. The victims probably had no close ties or they were engaged in something illegal. I want to go back to the diamonds, but Keebal has his own agenda.

“I read an interesting statistic the other day. Thirty-five percent of offenders found guilty of homicide claim amnesia of the event.”

More bloody statistics. “You think I'm lying.”

“I think you're bent.”

I reach for my crutches and swing onto my feet. “Since you know all the answers, Keebal, you tell me what happened. Oh, that's right—you weren't there. Then again—you never are. When real coppers are out risking their lives, you're at home tucked up in bed watching reruns of The Bill. You risk nothing and you persecute honest coppers for standards that you couldn't piss over. Get out of here. And next time you want to talk to me you better come armed with an arrest warrant and a set of handcuffs.”

Keebal's face turns a slapped-red color. He does lots of preening and flexing as he walks away, yelling over his shoulder. “The only person you got fooled is that neurologist. Nobody else believes you. You're gonna wish that bullet did the job.”

I try to chase them down the corridor, hopping on one crutch, and screaming my head off. Two black orderlies hold me back, pinning my arms behind me.

Finally, I calm down and they take me back to my room. Maggie gives me a small plastic cup of syrupy liquid and soon I'm like Alice in Wonderland shrinking into the room. The white folds of the bedclothes are an arctic wasteland.

The dream has a whiff of strawberry lip gloss and spearmint breath—a missing girl in a pink-and-orange bikini. Her name is Mickey Carlyle and she's wedged in the rocks in my mind like a spar of driftwood, bleached white by the sun—as white as her skin and the fine hairs on her forearms. She is four feet tall, tugging at my sleeve, saying, “Why didn't you ever find me? You promised my friend Sarah that you'd find me.”

She even says it in the same voice that Sarah used when she asked me for an ice-cream cone. “You promised me. You said I could have one if I told you what happened.”

Mickey disappeared not far from here. You might even be able to see Randolph Avenue from the window. It's a solid, redbrick canyon of mansion blocks built as cheap Victorian housing, but now the flats cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. I could save for ten years or two hundred and never afford to buy one.

I can still picture the lift, an old-fashioned metal cage that rattled and twanged between the landings. The stairs wrapped around the lift shaft, turning back and forth as they rose. Mickey grew up playing on those stairs, holding impromptu concerts after school because the acoustics were so good. She sang with a lisp because of the gap in her front teeth.

Three years have passed since then. The world has tuned out her story because there are other crimes to titillate and horrify—dead beauty queens, the war on terror, sportsmen behaving badly . . . Mickey hasn't gone away. She is still here. She is like the ghost who sits opposite me at every feast and the voice inside my head when I fall asleep. I know she's alive. I know it deep down inside, where my guts are tied in knots. I know it but I can't prove it.