They’d been doing everything they could for weeks, and still Harlan was beefing on about it. The fucking girl.
‘If you hadn’t told him about the footprints, you fucking fool,’ Ludo said to Nipper as they tramped through yet another muddy farmyard, ‘we wouldn’t be in this shit.’
‘You say that one more time and I am going to knock you flat on your arse in this shit,’ said Nipper.
‘Yeah? You and who else, I’d like to know.’
‘I’m back to town tomorrow, fuck this for a game. I had all this country crap growing up, I don’t want it no more.’
‘Ah yeah, you were a country boy, yeah? Well not me. Harlan’ll skin your arse like a grape, anyway, you show up without that damned girl. He will eat you whole. Me, I’m different. I start a job, I fucking well finish it.’
‘Yeah, that’s fucking heroic, you carry right on.’
‘I will.’
‘Great.’ Nipper looked up at this farmhouse. They were standing in front of this fucker and it looked just about ready to crumble into the soil. And hadn’t he been here before with the missing sister sob story? He was pretty sure he had, and he’d drawn a blank. Nevertheless, he picked up the knocker on the door and let it fall. Inside, right behind it, came a scrabbling and pawing and then a dog started going apeshit, barking the ruddy place down. He shrugged. ‘Dog’s in, anyway.’
Nobody came to the door. They turned away, sauntering back down the drive past old barns and crumbling outhouses and piles of rusty farm machinery.
‘No bastard about,’ said Ludo. He’d had the nous to pack wellies into the boot of the car this time, and he had them on right now, sparing his costly designer shoes. As usual, Nipper hadn’t thought of that; his own once-elegant footwear was caked in mud.
They strolled back down to the gate by the lane where the sign read Beechwood Farm. They were big on tree names out here; they’d already been into The Oaks, The Willows and The Spinney. Nipper and Ludo had been told the same thing over and over again. No new girls around here, and who the fuck were they, asking? She’s Nipper’s, or Neil’s, sister, they said, all sweet and innocent. She ran away from home and we’re worried about her. Fuck off was mostly the reply to that sad old tale.
‘Spinney’s a group of trees,’ Ludo told Nipper.
‘How d’you know that shit?’
‘I read, man. I looked it up. You know? Words on a page? You ought to try it. It was good enough for Shakespeare. It’s a noble pastime.’
‘Clubs and pussy, them’s my pastimes.’
‘How long before one of these yokels mentions us to the Bill?’
‘Not long. But we’ll be long gone by then, with any luck.’
Ludo phoned in to Harlan that night and told him the bad news. Still no sign of the girl anywhere.
‘Maybe it’s time we called this off, boss,’ he suggested, flopping on one of a pair of uncomfortable single beds. They were in a country pub that offered rooms, set by the side of a fast A road; at rush hour, the noise of the traffic zipping through was deafening, and in the evening the noise from the bar below their feet was annoying. Neither of them, used to five-star establishments and the best of everything, was very happy with this arrangement. Personally, Ludo thought that if he saw another field or another stretch of woodland then he was going to throw up or scream – or both.
‘You keep looking,’ said Harlan. ‘Belle’s smart. Smarter than you two tosspots. We call it off when I say so and not before.’
‘Sure, sure.’ Ludo rolled his eyes at Nipper, who was just emerging post-shower in a coarse white towelling robe. ‘Only the natives are getting damned restless, you see what I’m sayin’.’
Nipper went over to his jacket, which was hanging over the back of a chair. Nipper always left doors open, drawers too. He left the minibar ajar – not that there was a minibar in this low-class set-up – so that everything inside it got warm and nasty. Nipper’s clothes were always on the floor or draped over furniture. It infuriated Ludo, who was neat and shiny as a dollar, at all times. Usually, all he ever did was glimpse Nipper’s domestic habits. But for now, with only the one room available and having to share with the bastard, he was confronted with it up close and personal. Which he didn’t like. If Nipper snored, that would be the icing on the cake for Ludo. He would kill that fucker in his sleep.
‘Fuck the natives and fuck you too, Ludo,’ said Harlan. ‘What I say goes. You stay there and you keep looking and you stick to the cover story. All right?’
‘Yeah, boss,’ said Ludo, watching Nipper get out his gun and check it over.
Nuthin’ worth shootin’ around here but pheasants, he thought. And peasants.
‘You greased a few palms, like I told you?’ asked Harlan.
‘Yeah man, we done a thorough job. Local pubs, post offices, oil delivery men, shit wagons – you know they don’t have mains drainage out here in the backside of nowhere, boss? I tell you, it’s downright uncivilized – and we did the postmen. Anything and anyone we could think of, believe me, we’ve told ’em it’ll be worth their while to reunite us with Nipper’s long-lost sister. They got an incentive.’
‘Good. Because I want her finished. We started this and we are going to bring it to the proper conclusion, you understand me? I want this tidy, and I know that tidiness is your middle name, you like things wrapped up neat, ain’t that so, Ludo?’
It was. Ludo could sympathize, but he also thought that his boss would wrap him up neat, yeah, in a fucking shroud, if he ballsed this up. Nipper might be contented with near enough, that’ll do, but Ludo never was. Not that he thought there was any chance they’d find Belle Barton, not now. Girl was dead in a ditch somewhere, she’d carked it, the poor cow. Pretty soon her body was going to honk and then someone was going to find it. No doubt about that. But he’d keep this up for as long as Harlan wanted him to.
‘Yeah, that’s the truth, boss. I like things wrapped up tight.’
‘Then go to it.’
Harlan slapped the phone down and Ludo hung up. ‘Shit,’ he said.
‘Won’t stop?’ guessed Nipper.
‘Got it in one. Pass me the room service menu, man. I need food. Must be all this fresh air.’
‘They don’t do room service. We have to go down to the bar.’
Ludo rolled his eyes. ‘Fuck me,’ he said in annoyance. ‘Man, one way or another we got to get this thing done. Find a dead body or find the girl still breathing. Either one, I don’t give a shit. Or I am going to have to scout out some better accommodation as a matter of urgency.’