“All the time. It used to do my head in. She said she wanted to feel what Mum felt, see what Mum saw when she hit the water. I told her, you won’t feel or see nothing ’cos you’ll be dead.” Jake gave a barely perceptible shake of his head, his gaze drifting further.
Doubts crowded in on Julian. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Mia really had killed herself. He pushed the doubts away. He had to keep telling himself there was more to it, because at least that way there was a chance, however slim, that she was alive. “I don’t believe she’d do it.”
Jake’s eyes blinked back to Julian. “Why not?” His eyebrows knitted together as Julian gave him the rest of the story, flicking apart when he heard the part about Mia’s change of image and the Mercedes. “Let me get this straight in my head. You reckon Mia’s either faking it, or this Mr Ugly dude — who might be my dad — did my mum in and made it look like suicide, and has now done the same thing to my sister.”
Julian nodded. “Don’t suppose you’ve any idea who Mr Ugly is?”
Jake looked at him as if to say, what the fuck do you think? “Whoever the fuck he is, he’d better pray I never find out. ’Cos I’ll cut his cock off and feed it to him.” There was a quiet menace in his voice that suggested the threat wasn’t empty bravado.
“Well is there any way Mia could’ve found out who your dad is?”
“If there is, she never told me about it. All I know is he’s supposed to be an older dude. Probably one of those pervs who can’t get their dick up unless they’re fucking little girls.”
“And what about the man and the woman in the Merc? Any ideas about them?”
Jake rocked back onto the mattress. He took out a cigarette, lit it with a stick from the fire, and ran his tongue over his wolfish canines. “You say the woman was a red-head, big tits, looked like she’d been around.” When Julian nodded, Jake’s face wrinkled into a thoughtful frown. “Could be Ginger. She works behind the bar at the H-Bomb.”
“The H-Bomb? Where’s that? I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s on the other side of town. It’s The Outlaws’ place.”
“Who are The Outlaws?”
“They’re bikers.” Jake squinted sideways at Julian. “How long you lived in this town?”
“All my life.”
Jake snuffed contemptuously, but for an instant a kind of bitter longing showed in his eyes. “Fuck, you must’ve led a sheltered life.”
“I suppose I have,” admitted Julian. “So what makes you think the woman I saw could be this Ginger?”
“She’s the only person I can think of who looks anything like you say. And Mia and Jo used to go to The H- Bomb with Weasel sometimes. There’s something else n’all.” Jake sucked uneasily on his cigarette, as though the something else disturbed him. “Ginger’s not just a barmaid, she’s also junkie whore.”
Julian frowned too now. “So if it was this Ginger I saw, does that mean Mia was…” He hesitated, loathe to suggest to Jake that his twin sister was prostituting herself.
“Pulling tricks,” said Jake, reading between the lines. “I can’t think of any other reason for Mia to get in a car with Ginger done up like some slutty little girl. Can you?”
Julian’s earlier doubts returned to haunt him. If Jake was right, Mia’s disappearance surely had nothing to do with her father. Like an extension of his nightmare in a waking state, an image rose in his mind of Mister Ugly leering at Mia, sniffing, licking. He shifted his gaze to the fire, clenching his teeth, suppressing a shudder. Another thought ran like a cold sickness through his brain. What if both me and Jake are right? What if Mia had been prostituting herself and somehow chanced to discover that her ‘trick’ was also her Julian abruptly checked the thought. No, that was too twisted, too nauseating to even contemplate. But what if? What if? He couldn’t hold the shudder in any longer. It passed convulsively over his frame.
“You okay?” asked Jake, an edge of suspicion back in his voice.
Julian nodded, uncomfortable under Jake’s searching eyes. “What about Joanne Butcher? Were the rumours about her true?”
“Yeah, probably. Junk’ll do that if you let it get on top of you. And she was using way, way too much.”
“When did you last see her?”
“A couple of days before she went missing. We got high together. She phoned me, said she had some good junk. Fuck knows where she scored it from, but it wasn’t the usual watered-down shit you get round here. One hit knocked me on my arse, and I only smoked it. Jo was shooting the stuff up. I tell you, I didn’t even blink when I heard she’d OD’d.”
“How do you think she ended up in the forest?”
Jake shrugged. “Maybe she was looking for me. She knew I used this place.”
“But you weren’t here.”
“Obviously not,” said Jake, a little rise of irritation in his voice. “I move around a lot. Keeps the coppers off my track.”
Perplexed, Julian wrinkled his brow. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why didn’t she phone and find out where you were before coming out here?”
“She was a junkie. Junkie’s don’t make no sense.” Jake eyed Julian with the look of a wary animal trying to work out the motives and strength of another. “You know what don’t make no sense to me. You, you don’t make no sense to me.”
A thin smile stretched Julian’s lips. “I don’t make much sense to myself most of the time, either.”
Jake made a low noise in his throat as though he didn’t buy that. “Weasel says you’re loaded.”
“Do I look loaded?”
“Oh yeah, you look it alright.” Jake flicked his cigarette into the fire. “Someday I’m gonna look it n’all. I dunno how, but I am. I’m gonna have money and a big house, plasma TV in every room, and all the rest of it.”
Julian remembered something he’d heard his Grandma Alice say to his dad once. “Being rich isn’t just about money. It’s about having enough.”
“Enough? What the fuck does that mean?”
“I guess it means that some of us, no matter how much money we have, will never be happy.”
Jake spat in the fire. “Shit, you gotta be rich in the first place to talk like that.”
They sat in silence a moment, watching the flames shoot shadows up the walls. Jake drew a long breath suddenly, rubbing his hand over his chest as though there was a pain there. “It’s funny,” he said. “Mia used to reckon that if I hurt myself she felt it. She said it was ’cos the souls of twins are linked by ES…ES something.”
“ESP,” said Julian, thinking about his grandma.
“Yeah, that’s it.” Jake looked at Julian with a kind of appeal in his eyes. “Do you reckon that’s true?”
Julian felt a prickle at the back of his throat. Any suggestion of the supernatural put him on edge. He wanted to reply with a flat no, but couldn’t bring himself to — not in the face of the vulnerability Jake was exposing to him. He shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“If it is true, that means Mia can’t be dead. ’Cos if she was I’d have felt something, wouldn’t I?”
Julian said nothing. Jake nodded to himself as if reinforcing his belief in the possibility. He jumped up. “Where you going?” asked Julian.
“To look for Ginger. What’s your mobile number?” As Julian told him, Jake tapped it into his own phone. “I’ll call you when I find her.”
Jake headed for the doorway. He paused to look back at Julian, eyes narrow. “You sure you didn’t fuck my sister? ’Cos if I find out you’re lying…” He broke off and let the words hang between them.
“I could of, but I didn’t,” said Julian, holding Jake’s gaze, but cringing inwardly at the gruesome image the threat conjured up.
Chapter 14
When Julian got home, Wanda was gone and his dad was there, drinking whisky. There was a slight glaze over his pupils that told Julian he already had a few glasses under his belt. He stared at Julian for half-a-minute, not speaking, looking straight into his eyes, as if trying to see inside his skull. Then he said, “I thought you were coming back to the hospital.”
