The Mystery of Mercy Close Read Online Free PDF

me he’d get it together, but this morning he didn’t show up again. Wasn’t answering either his landline or mobile. We decided to carry on with rehearsal. Let him take the day off to have his little protest, we decided –’
    ‘Who’s “we”?’
    ‘Me. And I suppose John Joseph. So after we finished up today I rang Wayne and his mobile was switched off so I called round to his house
again
, like I haven’t enough to be doing. And he’s gone. He’s just … disappeared. Which is where you come in.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘There are dozens of private investigators in this city. All of them desperate for work. Go to one of them.’
    ‘Listen to me, Helen.’ He was suddenly passionate. ‘I could hire any old grunt to hack into the airline manifests for the last twenty-four hours. Hey, I could sit on my phones myself and systematically call every hotel in the country. But I’ve a feeling none of that is going to work. Wayne’s tricky. Anyone else, they’d be holed up in some hotel, getting room service and massages. Playing golf.’ He suppressed a shudder. ‘But Wayne … I haven’t a clue where he is.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘I need you to get inside Wayne’s head. I need someone who thinks a bit left-field, and, in your own unpleasant little way, Helen Walsh, you’re a genius.’
    He had a point. I’m lazy and illogical. I’ve limited people skills. I’m easily bored and easily irritated. But I have moments of brilliance. They come and they go and I can’t depend on them but they do happen.
    ‘Wayne,’ Jay Parker said, ‘is hiding in plain sight.’
    ‘Oh really?’ I widened my eyes and looked from left to right and up and down and all around me. ‘Plain sight, you say? Do you see him? No? And I don’t either. So that blows that theory.’
    ‘All I’m saying is he won’t be
hiding
hiding, like a normal person. He’s hiding all right, and it won’t be somewhere obvious, but when you find him it’ll seem like the most logical place possible.’
    Convoluted, or what?
    ‘Jay, it sounds like Wayne was … distressed. Shaving his head and that. I know you’re maddened with greed, with your visions of your Laddz tea towels and your Laddz lunch-boxes, but if Wayne Diffney is out there thinking of hurting himself, you’ve a duty to tell someone.’
    ‘Hurting himself?’ Jay stared at me in amazement. ‘Who said anything about that? Look, I’ve told this all wrong. Wayne’s just throwing a strop.’
    ‘I dunno …’
    ‘He’s sulking, is all.’
    Maybe he was. Maybe I was putting the stuff in my own head on to Wayne.
    ‘I think you should go to the police.’
    ‘They wouldn’t touch it. He’s disappeared voluntarily; he’s only been gone twenty-four hours at most … And it’s got to be kept out of the press. How about this, Helen Walsh? Come with me to his house and see if you can get a feel for things. Give me an hour of your time and I’ll pay you for ten. Double rate.’
    A voice in my head was saying, over and over, Jay Parker is a bad man.
    ‘Loads of lovely lolly,’ Jay said enticingly. ‘Lean times for private investigators.’
    He wasn’t wrong. Times had never been leaner. It had been horrible watching the work slip away over the past two years, having less and less to do each day and eventually earning no money at all. But you know, it wasn’t even the lure of money that was sending my heart racing; it was the thought of having something to do, of having a conundrum to focus on, to keep me out of my own head.
    ‘What’s it to be?’ Jay asked, watching me closely.
    ‘Pay me first.’
    ‘Okay.’ He handed over a bundle of notes and I checked them. He had paid for ten hours, at double time, just as he’d promised.
    ‘So now we go to Wayne’s?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m not up for breaking and entering.’ Sometimes I was. It’s illegal, but what’s life without a little terror-induced adrenaline?
    ‘You’re okay, I’ve got a key.’

4
    We went in