‘This is a rollicking read that expands the boundaries and standards of the thriller. Painstakingly researched, effectively written and well conceived, it deserves all of its pre-release hype – and to make Nick Stone a novelist to contend with in the field of thriller writing’ Big Issue

‘Mr Clarinet is a classic page turner. If you like your crime thrillers dark and brooding with a hint of the supernatural, Mr Clarinet will definitely push all the right buttons – and then some’ Bolton Evening News

‘One of the real thrills to be found in reviewing books is stumbling across an unexpected masterwork, and Nick Stone’s debut novel is just such a tour de force… Mr Clarinet is crime fiction at its artistic and engrossing zenith – challenging, compelling and offering insights that burrow without fanfare or any warning into the reader’s delicate psyche’ Shots Magazine

‘There are some books you know you are never going to be able to put out of your mind and Mr Clarinet is one of them… It’s unbelievable that this is a first novel. It’s vivid, assured, polished and powerful. Choose your own complimentary adjectives, as they’re bound to apply. And whatever you do, read this book’ Reviewingtheevidence. com

Mr Clarinet

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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And in loving memory of Philomène Paul (Fofo),
Ben Cawdry, Adrian ‘Skip’ Skipsey and my grandmother, Mary Stone

Acknowledgements

With very special thanks to my agent, Lesley Thorne, for her incredible commitment and support, and to Beverley Cousins, my inspiring editor.

And to those without whom…

Dad; The Mighty Bromfields: Cecil, Lucy, Gregory, David, Sonia, Colin, Janice, Brian and Lynette; Novlyn, Errol and Dwayne Thompson; The Count, Tim Heath, Suzanne Lovell, Angie Robinson, Rupert Stone, Jan and Vi, Sally and Dick Gallagher, Lloyd Strickland, Pauli and Tiina Toivola, Rick Saba, Christine Stone, Robert and Sonia Philipps, Al and Pedro Diaz, Janet Clarke, Tomas Carruthers, Chas Cook, Clare Oxborrow, Michael und die Familie Schmidt, Georg und die Familie Bischof, Haarm van Maanen, Bill Pearson, Lindsay Leslie-Miller, Claire Harvey, Emma Riddington, Lisa Godwin, Big T, Max Allen, Alex Walsh, Steve Purdom, Nadine Radford, Simon Baron-Cohen, Marcella Edwards, Mike Mastrangelo, Torr, Seamus ‘The Legend’ and Cal de Grammont, Scottish John, Anthony Armstrong Burns of E2, Shahid Iqbal, Abdul Moquith, Khoi Quan-Khio, mon frère Fouad, Whittards and Wrigley’s.

… thank you!

Prologue

Ten million dollars if he performed a miracle and brought the boy back alive, five million dollars if he came back with just the body, and another five million if he dragged the killers in with it – their dead-or-alive status was immaterial, as long as they had the kid’s blood on their hands.

Max Mingus was an ex-cop turned private investigator. Missing persons were his specialty, finding them his talent. Most people said he was the best in the business – or at least they had until 17th April 1989, the day he’d started a seven-year sentence for manslaughter on Attica Island and had his licence permanently revoked.

The client’s name was Allain Carver. His son’s name was Charlie. Charlie was missing, presumed kidnapped.

Optimistically, with things going to plan and ending happily for all concerned, Max was looking at riding out into the sunset a millionaire ten to fifteen times over. There were a lot of things he wouldn’t have to worry about again, and he’d been doing a lot of worrying lately, nothing but worrying.

He knew this about Haiti: voodoo, AIDS, Papa Doc, Baby Doc, boat people and, recently, an American military invasion called Operation Restore Democracy he’d seen on TV.

He knew – or had known – quite a few Haitians, ex-pats he’d had regular dealings with back when he’d been a cop and worked a case in Little Haiti, Miami. They hadn’t had a decent thing to say about their homeland, ‘bad place’ being the most common and kindest.

Nevertheless, he had fond memories of most of the Haitians he’d met. In fact, he’d admired them. They were honest, honourable, hard-working people who’d found themselves in the most unenviable place in America – bottom of the food chain, south of the poverty line, a lot of ground to make up.

That went for most of the Haitians he’d met. When it came to people there were always plenty of exceptions to every generalization, and he’d come face to face with those. They hadn’t left him with bad memories so much as the kind of wounds that never really heal, that open up at the slightest nudge or touch.

The whole thing was already sounding like a bad idea. He’d just come out of one tough spot. Why go to another?

Charlie had disappeared on 4 September 1994, his third birthday. Nothing had been heard or seen of him since. There had been no ransom demands and there were no witnesses. The Carver family had had to call off its search for the boy after two weeks because the US army had invaded the country and put it on lockdown, imposing curfews and travel restrictions on the whole population. The search hadn’t resumed until late October, by which time the trail, already born cold, had frozen over.

‘There’s one other thing,’ Carver said when he’d finished talking. ‘If you take the job, it’s going to be dangerous… Make that very dangerous.’

There was a pause. Carver’s face turned grim and his skin lost a little of its colour.

Honesty and straightforwardness weren’t always the best options, but Max chose them over bullshit as often as he could. It helped him sleep at night.

‘I won’t because I can’t. I can’t do it. You’re asking me to look for a kid who went missing two years ago, in a country that went back to the Stone Age about the same time.’

Carver managed a smile so faint it barely registered on his lips, yet let Max know he was being considered unsophisticated. It also told Max what kind of rich he was dealing with. Not rich, riche – old money, the worst; connections plugged in at every socket, all the lights on, everybody home – multi-storey bank vaults, fuck-off stockholdings, high-interest offshore accounts; first-name terms with everybody who’s anybody in every walk of life, power to crush you to oblivion. These were people you never said no to, people you never failed.

‘You’ve succeeded at far tougher assignments. You’ve performed – miracles,’ Carver said.

‘Not if you’re talking to me,’ Max said. He regretted his bluntness. Prison had reformed his erstwhile tact and replaced it with coarseness. ‘In a way you’re right. I’ve looked for ghosts in hellholes in my time, but they were American hellholes and there was always a bus out. I don’t know your country. I’ve never been there and – no disrespect meant – I’ve never wanted to go there. Hell, they don’t even speak English.’

Max hadn’t made a fortune as a private detective, but he’d done OK – enough to get by and have a little extra to play with. His wife, who was a qualified accountant, had managed the business side of things. She’d put a fair bit of rainy-day money away in their three savings accounts, and they’d had points in the L Bar, a successful yuppie joint in downtown Miami run by Frank Nunez, a retired cop friend of Max’s. They’d owned their house and two cars outright, taken three vacations every year, and eaten at fancy restaurants once a month.

He’d had few personal expenses. His clothes – suits for work and special occasions, khakis and T-shirts at all other times – were always well cut but rarely expensive. He’d learnt his lesson after his second case, when he’d got arterial spray on his five-hundred-dollar suit and had to surrender it in to forensics, who later handed it in to the DA who recycled it in court as Exhibit D. He sent his wife flowers every week, bought her lavish presents on her birthday, and at Christmas and on their anniversary; he was also generous to his closest friends, and his godson. He had no addictions. He’d quit cigarettes and reefer when he’d left the force; booze had taken a little longer, but that had gone out of his life too. Music was his only real indulgence – jazz, swing, doo-wop, rock ’n’ roll, soul, funk and disco; he had five thousand CDs, vinyl albums and singles he knew every note and lyric to. The most he’d ever spent was when he’d dropped four hundred bucks at an auction on an autographed original double ten-inch vinyl copy of Frank Sinatra’s ‘In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning’. He’d framed it and hung it in his study, opposite his desk. When his wife asked he lied and told her he’d picked it up cheap at a house repo-sale in Orlando.

All in all, it had been a comfortable life, the sort that made you happy and fat and gradually more and more conservative.

And then he’d gone and killed three people in the Bronx, and the wheels had come off and everything had skidded to a loud, ungainly stop.

Post-prison: Max still had the house and his car in Miami, plus $9,000 in a savings account. He could live on that for another four or five months tops, then he’d have to sell the house and find a job. That would be hard. Who would employ him? Ex-cop, ex-PI, ex-con – three crosses, no ticks. He was forty-six: too old to learn anything new and too young to give in. What the fuck would he do? Bar work? Kitchen work? Pack shopping bags? Construction? Mall security?

True, he had some friends and people who owed him but he’d never called in a favour in his life, and he wasn’t about to start now that he was on his knees. It would be tantamount to begging, and that went up against his every rule. He’d helped people out because he could at the time, not for what they could do for him later, not for points in the karma bank. His wife had called him naïve, marshmallow soft under the concrete and razor wire carapace he showed the world. Maybe she’d been right. Maybe he should have put self-interest before others. Would his life have been any different now? Probably, yes.

He saw his future, clearly, a year or two from now. He’d be living in one of those one-room apartments with stained wallpaper, tribes of warring roaches, and a set of dos and don’ts on the door, handwritten in semi-literate Spanish. He’d hear his neighbours arguing, fucking, talking, fighting; upstairs, downstairs, left and right. His life would be one chipped plate, a knife, a fork and a spoon. He’d play the lotto and watch the results go against him on a portable TV with a shaky picture. Slow death, gradual extinction, one cell at a time.

Take Carver’s job or take his chances in the post-con world. He had no other choice.

Max had first spoken to Allain Carver over the phone in prison. They didn’t get off to a good start. Max had told him to fuck off as soon as he’d introduced himself.

Carver had been pestering him pretty much every day of the last eight months of his sentence.

‘Dear Mr Mingus, My name is Allain Carver. I greatly admire you and everything you stand for. Having followed your case closely…’

Max stopped reading there. He gave the letter to Velasquez, his cellmate, who used it to make a joint. Velasquez had smoked all of Max’s letters, except for the personal ones. Max nicknamed him ‘The Incinerator’.

Max was a celebrity prisoner. His case had been on TV and in all of the papers. At one point almost half the country had had a strong opinion about him and what he’d done, a sixty–forty split, for and against.

During his first six months behind bars he’d had fan mail by the sackful. He’d never replied to any of it. Even the sincerest well-wishers left him cold. He’d always despised strangers who corresponded with convicted criminals they’d seen on TV, or read about in the papers, or met through those fucked-up prisoner penpal clubs. They were the first to demand the death penalty when the boot was on the other foot and that foot had stomped one of their loved ones to death. Max had been a cop for eleven years. There was a lot of it left over in him. Many of his closest friends were still on the force, keeping these very same people safe from the animals they wrote to.

When Carver’s first letter arrived, Max’s mail was down to letters from his wife, in-laws and friends. His fanbase had moved on to more appreciative types like OJ Simpson and the Menendez brothers.

Carver met Max’s silence over his first letter with a follow-up two weeks later. When that too elicited no response, Max received another Carver letter the next week, then two more the week after that and, seven days later, two more again. Velasquez was pretty happy. He liked Carver’s letters because the paper – thick watermarked cream stationery, with Carver’s name, address and contact numbers embossed on the right-hand corner in emerald foil letters – had something in it that reacted fantastically with his weed and got him more stoned than usual.

Carver tried different tactics to get Max’s attention – he changed paper, wrote longhand and got other people to write in – but no matter what he tried everything went by way of the Incinerator.

So the letters stopped and the phone calls started. Max guessed that Carver had bribed someone high up because only inmates with serious juice or imminent retrials were allowed to take incoming calls. A guard fetched him from the kitchens and took him to one of the conference cells where a phone had been plugged in, just for him. He spoke to Carver, long enough to hear his name, think he was English from his accent and tell him what was what and never to call him again.

But Carver didn’t give up. Max would be interrupted at work, in the exercise yard, at meals, in the shower, during lockdowns, after lights-out. He dealt with Carver as he always did: ‘Hello’, hear Carver’s voice, hang up.

Max eventually complained to the warden, who thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. Most inmates griped about hassles on the inside. He told Max not to be such a pussy and threatened to put a phone in his cell if he bothered him again with such bullshit.

Max told Dave Torres, his lawyer, about Carver’s calls. Torres put a stop to them. He also offered to dig up some information about Carver, but Max passed. In the free world he would have been curious as hell; but in prison curiosity was something you gave up with your court clothes and your wristwatch.

The day before his release, Max had a visit from Carver. Max refused to see him, so Carver left him his final letter, back on the original stationery.

The round-the-world tour had been his wife’s idea, something she’d always wanted to do. She’d long been fascinated by other countries and their cultures, their histories and monuments, their people. She was always going off to museums, queuing up to get into the latest exhibitions, attending lectures and seminars, and always reading – magazines, newspaper articles and book after book after book. She tried her best to sweep Max along with her enthusiasms, but he wasn’t remotely interested. She showed him pictures of South American Indians who could wear pizza plates in their bottom lips, African women with giraffe-like necks fitted with industrial springs and he really couldn’t begin to see the attraction. He’d been to Mexico, the Bahamas, Hawaii and Canada, but his world was really just the USA and that was a world big enough for him. At home they had deserts and arctic wastes and pretty much everything in between. Why go abroad for the same shit, only older?

His wife’s name was Sandra. He’d met her when he was still a cop. She was half-Cuban, half-African–American. She was beautiful, clever, tough and funny. He never called her Sandy.

She’d planned for them to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary in style, travelling the globe, seeing most of the things she’d only read about. If things had been different Max would probably have talked her into going to the Keys for a week, with the promise of a modest foreign trip (to Europe or Australia) later in the year, but because he was in prison when she told him her plans, he wasn’t in a position to refuse. Besides, from where he was, getting as far away from America as possible seemed like a good idea. That year out would give him time to think about the rest of his life and what best to do with it.

It took Sandra four months to organize and book the tour. She arranged the itinerary so they’d arrive back home in Miami exactly a year to the day they’d left, on their next wedding anniversary. In between they would see all of Europe, starting with England, and then they’d move on to Russia and China, followed by Japan and the Far East, before flying on to Australia and New Zealand, and then on to Africa and the Middle East, before closing out in Turkey.

The more she told Max about the trip during her weekly visits, the more he started looking forward to it. He took to reading up about some of the places they’d be visiting in the prison library. It was initially a way of getting him out of one day and into the next, but the more he began to delve into the stuff of his wife’s dreams, the closer he got to her, perhaps closer than he’d ever been.

She finished paying for the trip the day she died in a car crash on US I, which she appeared to have caused by inexplicably and quite suddenly switching lanes straight into the path of an oncoming truck. When they performed the autopsy they found the brain aneurysm that had killed her at the wheel.

The warden broke the news to him. Max was too stunned to react. He nodded, said nothing else and left the warden’s office and went about the rest of his day pretty much as normal, cleaning the kitchen surfaces, serving at the counter, feeding the trays through the dishwasher, mopping the floors. He didn’t say anything to Velasquez. You didn’t do that. Showing grief or sadness or any emotion unrelated to anger was a sign of weakness. You kept those things well hidden, bottled up, out of sight and sense.

Sandra’s death didn’t sink in until the next day, Thursday. Thursday was her visiting day. She’d never missed one. She’d fly in the night before, stay with an aunt who lived in Queens, and then, the next day, she’d drive up to see him. At around 2.00 pm, when he’d usually be finishing off in the kitchen or bullshitting with Henry the cook, he’d be called out to the visiting room over the tannoy. Sandra would be waiting for him on the other side of the booth, behind the glass partition and the wall between them. She’d always be immaculately dressed, a fresh layer of lipstick on her mouth, big smile on her face, eyes lighting up, just like she was on a first date. They’d talk about this and that, how he was feeling, how he was looking, then she’d give him back-home news, tell him about herself, tell him about the house, talk about her job.

Henry and Max had an arrangement. Henry would work around Max on Thursdays, giving him things he could finish up quickly so he could get out as soon as his name was called. Max always helped Henry out in the same way on Sundays, when Henry’s family – his wife and four kids – came to see him. They got on well enough for Max to ignore that Henry was doing fifteen to life for an armed robbery that had left a pregnant woman dead, and that he ran with the Aryan Brotherhood.

On the outside it was business as usual that Thursday. Only, Max had woken up with a heavy, aching feeling in his chest and a sense of emptiness that opened up into a numb void as the morning went on. He kept on hearing a peculiar rush of air in his ears, as though he was stuck in a wind tunnel, and the vein in his forehead began to wriggle and twitch under his skin. He wanted to tell Henry his wife wasn’t coming that week and then let him know the why the following week, but he couldn’t bring himself to say anything because he knew the minute he did he’d lose control of his words and most likely crack up.

He didn’t have enough to do in the kitchen to keep his mind busy. He had the almost spotless cooker to wipe down. The cooker had a clock set in the middle of its controls. He tried to stop himself, but he kept on staring at the clock, watching the black hands move in clicks, stepping up to 2.00.

He replayed the previous week’s visit in his mind, every single second of the last time they were together. He recalled every word she’d said to him – about the surprise discount she’d managed to get from one airline, the free nights at a luxury hotel she’d won in a competition, how impressed she was with his knowledge of Australian history. Had she ever said anything about migraines, or headaches, or dizzy spells, blackouts, nosebleeds? He saw her face again through the bulletproof glass partition they met through; the glass was smeared with the ghostly fingerprints and lipmarks of where a million convicts had touched and kissed their loved ones by proxy. They’d never done that. They agreed it was pointless and desperate. It wasn’t as if they’d never get to do the real thing again, was it? He wished they had now. It would have been better than the absolute nothing he was left with.

It was a few clicks away from 2.00. Max started taking off his apron, right on cue, then stopped.

‘She’s not coming today,’ he said, letting the straps of the apron fall to his side. He felt a hot surge of tears geyser up to his eyes and mass around the edges.

Max didn’t answer. Henry came over to him, wiping his hands on a dishcloth. He saw Max’s face, about to crack wide open and spill. He looked surprised. He even backed off a step. Like almost everyone else in the joint, he thought Max was a tough motherfucker – an ex-cop in General Population who’d held his head up and hadn’t once flinched from meeting violence with violence.

He could have smiled out of mockery, or the sadistic delight in the misfortune of others that passes for happiness in prison, or plain simple confusion. Tough guys didn’t cry – unless they were pussies all along, or worse, in mid-meltdown.

He punched Henry in the throat, a straight short jab powered in with his full weight that went directly to the windpipe. Henry’s mouth dropped open. He gasped out for air. Max smashed a right hook into his jaw and busted the bone in two. Henry was a big tall guy, a daily freeweight freak who could press 350 clean without breaking a sweat. He went down with a huge thud.

It was a bad move, the worst. Henry was high up in the Brotherhood, and their main source of income. They dealt the best drugs in Attica. Henry’s kids smuggled them in for him in the cracks of their asses. The Brotherhood would want blood, a face-saving kill.

Henry was in the infirmary for three days. Max deputized in his absence, all the while waiting for payback. The Brotherhood weren’t stray killers. They liked to come in packs of four or five. The guards would know about it in advance. Tipped off and paid off, they’d look the other way, as would everyone in the vicinity. Inside, where he hurt most, he prayed they stuck him clean, straight through a vital organ. He didn’t want to wind up a free man in a wheelchair.

Henry claimed he’d slipped on some stray grease on the kitchen floor. He was back running the kitchen by Sunday, his jaw tightly wired. He’d heard about Max’s loss and the first thing he did when he saw him again was shake his hand and pat him on the shoulder. This made Max feel worse about hitting him.

Sandra’s funeral was held in Miami, a week after her death. Max was allowed to attend.

She was laid out in an open casket. The undertaker had dressed her in a black wig that didn’t suit her. Her real hair had never been that straight or that black; she’d had a russet tinge to it in places, brown in others. The make-up was all wrong too. She’d never needed much when she was alive. He kissed her cold rigid lips and slipped his fingers between her folded hands. He stood there staring down at her forever, feeling her a million miles away. Dead bodies were nothing new to him, but it was very different when it was the most important person in his life.

He kissed her again. He desperately wanted to flick her eyes open and see them one last time. She’d never closed her eyes when they kissed, ever. He reached out and then noticed that the overhanging white lilies from the massed display had shed their pollen on to the collar of the dark-blue pinstriped business suit she’d been dressed in. He wiped it clean.

At the service her youngest brother Calvin sang ‘Let’s Stay Together’, her favourite song. The last time he’d sung it was at their wedding. Calvin had an incredible voice, mournful and piercing like Roy Orbison’s. It busted Max up. He cried his fucking heart out. He hadn’t cried since he’d been a kid. He cried so much his shirt collar got wet and his eyes swelled up.

On the way back to Attica, Max decided he’d take the trip Sandra had spent the final part of her life organizing. It was partly to honour her wishes, partly to see all the things she never would, partly to live her dream, and mostly because he didn’t know what else to do with himself.

His lawyer, Dave Torres, picked him up outside the prison gates and drove him to the Avalon Rex, a small hotel in Brooklyn, a few blocks away from Prospect Park. The room was functional – bed, desk, chair, closet, bedside table, lamp, clock-radio and phone – and there was a communal bathroom and trough-like sink on the top floor. He was booked in for two days and nights, after which he was taking a plane to England from JFK. Torres handed him his tickets, passport, three thousand bucks in cash and two credit cards. Max thanked Torres for everything and they shook hands and said goodbye.

First thing Max did was open his door, step out of his room, walk back inside and close it behind him. He liked it so much he did it again and again half a dozen times until he’d taken the shine off the novelty of being able to come and go as he pleased. Next thing he did was take off his clothes and check himself out in the wardrobe mirror.

Max hadn’t seen himself naked in a mirror since he’d last been a free man. Eight years on, he looked good from the neck down, dressed in just his two tattoos. Big shoulders and bulging biceps, chunky forearms, a short wide neck, cobblestone abs, thick thighs; put him in a posing pouch and body oil and he could have won a Mr Penitentiary trophy. There was an art to working out in prison. It wasn’t about vanity and fitness, it was about survival. It was wise to be big – if you cast an impressive shadow people thought twice about fucking with you, and usually kept out of your way – but you didn’t want to get too big in case you stood out and became a target for young first-timers out to get a rep; there was nothing more ridiculous-looking than a cellblock hulk dying from a toothbrush shiv rammed in his jugular. Max was very fit before he’d gone into prison. He’d been a three-times Golden Gloves middleweight boxing champion in his teens, and he’d stayed in shape running, swimming and sparring at a local boxing gym near Coral Gables. Exercise wasn’t a quantum leap to him; he had the in-built discipline that comes from learning to swallow a punch whole. He’d been allowed half an hour a day in Attica. He’d hit the weights six days a week, upper body one day, legs the next. He’d done three thousand push-ups and crunches in his cell, every morning, five hundred at a time.

Although still handsome in the blunt and brutal sort of way that deceptively appealed to women with a taste for rough men and kamikaze relationships, his face wasn’t too good. His skin was tight, but it was wrinkled and waxy pale, almost ghostly from the lack of sunlight. The needlepoint scars around his lips had faded. There was a new meanness in his blue eyes and a sour downturn to the ends of his mouth he recognized from his mother who, like him, had been left alone at the onset of her autumnal years. And as had happened to her at the same age, his hair had gone completely grey. He hadn’t noticed the transition from the dark brown he’d been on the day of his incarceration, because he’d stayed bald in the joint to appear more forbidding. He’d let his hair grow out in the last few weeks leading up to his release – a mistake he intended to rectify before he left town.

The next morning he went out. He needed to buy a warm winter coat and jacket, and a hat too if he was going to lose his old man’s hair. It was a bright, freezing cold day. The air burned his lungs. The street was swarming with a multitude of people. Suddenly he was lost and didn’t know what he was doing or where he was going. He’d walked slap bang into the middle of rush-hour, everybody on their way to earn money and take shit with a thank you and a smile and build up a tailback of grudges and resentments in the process. He should’ve known better and prepared himself for it, but he felt as if he’d been beamed in from another planet against his will. Seven years of time slipped its leash and rushed at him, jaws wide open, belly empty. Everything had changed – clothes, hairstyles, walks, faces, brands, prices, languages – too much to take in and absorb and break down and analyse and compare. Too much too soon after prison, where everything stayed the same and you were on at least face terms with everyone you saw. Now he was straight in at the deep end. He could float but he’d forgotten the strokes. He plodded along, keeping two steps behind the people in front of him and two steps in front of those behind, chain-gang style. Maybe no matter how free we think we are, we’re all prisoners in our own way, he thought. Or maybe he just needed time to wake up and get with the programme.

He slipped out of the crowd and snuck into a small café. It was packed with people getting a caffeine fix before hitting their offices. He ordered an espresso. It came in a cardboard cup with a holder and a warning printed on the side that the drink was VERY HOT. When he tasted it it was lukewarm.

What was he doing in New York? It wasn’t even his town. What was he doing even thinking of travelling the world when he hadn’t been home, got his bearings and readjusted himself to freedom?

Sandra wouldn’t have wanted him to do this. She would have said it was pointless, running away when he’d have to come back eventually. True. What was he scared of? Her not being there? She was gone. He’d just have to get over. And the way you got over was by walking across the absence, embracing your loss, and moving on.

In his hotel room Max called up the airlines. All flights booked solid for the next two and a half days. He got a seat for the Friday afternoon.

Even though he didn’t have a clue what he’d do when he got to Miami, he felt better now that he was heading somewhere familiar.

He thought about taking a shower and getting something to eat, and maybe that haircut if he could find somewhere.

Dave Torres. He was the only one who knew where Max was. How long had he been working for Carver? Probably when Max had asked him to stop the calls he was getting in prison. Instead of going to the authorities, Torres had gone to the man himself. Double-dealing scumbag never missed an opportunity to make a buck.

Carver had stood up from behind an armchair when Max had walked into the club. Instead of coming over, he’d taken a few steps forward to identify himself and then stood where he was, arms behind his back, in the style of royalty meeting an ambassador from a former colonial state, now hopelessly impoverished and in dire need of a handout.

Tall and slender, dressed in a well-tailored navy-blue wool suit, light-blue shirt and matching silk tie, Carver might have strolled in off a 1920s-set musical where he’d been cast as an extra in a Wall Street scene. His short blond hair was slicked back from his forehead and parted down the middle. He had a strong jaw, long pointed face and tanned skin.

They shook hands. Firm handshake, soft smooth skin, unperturbed by manual labour.

Carver motioned him to a black leather and mahogany tub chair set in front of a round table. He waited until Max had sat down before he took his place opposite him. The chair was high-backed and finished some two feet above his head. He couldn’t see to his left or right without leaning all the way forward and craning his neck out. It was like being in his own booth, intimate and secretive.

Behind him was a bar that stretched the width of the room. Every conceivable spirit seemed to be lined up there – green, blue, yellow, pink, white, brown, clear and semi-clear bottles glinting as gaily as plastic bead curtains in a well-heeled brothel.

Carver looked over to the far end of the room and raised his hand. A waitress approached. She was camera-lens thin, with high cheekbones, pouting lips and a catwalk strut. All the staff Max had seen so far looked like models: both the barmen had that slowburn stubbled seducer look advertisers employed to sell white shirts and aftershave, while he could have easily wished up the receptionist from a clothes store catalogue, and in another life the security guy monitoring the CCTV screen in a side office might have been the Diet Coke break guy on the construction site.

Max had almost missed the club. It was in an anonymous five-storey townhouse in a cul-de-sac off Park Row, so anonymous that he’d walked past it twice before he’d noticed the number 34 stamped faintly into the wall near the door. The club was three flights up in a mirrored elevator with polished brass handles running around the middle and reflections accordioning to infinity. When the doors opened and he’d stepped out, Max thought he’d arrived in the lobby of a particularly luxurious hotel.

The interior was vast and very quiet, like a library or a mausoleum. All over the thickly carpeted floor the same black tub chairs sprouted like burned-out oak stumps in a desecrated forest. They were arranged so you only saw their backs and not the people in them. He’d thought they were alone until he saw clouds of cigar smoke escaping from behind one of the chairs, and when he looked around more closely he saw a man’s foot in a beige slip-on beyond another. A single framed painting adorned the wall nearest to them. It was of a young boy playing a flute. He was dressed in a ragged, Civil War-era military uniform a good ten years too big for him.

‘We own it. This and several similar establishments around the world,’ Carver replied.

‘Not particularly,’ Carver answered, with an amused look on his face. ‘My father, Gustav, set these up in the late fifties to cater for his best business clients. This was the first. We have others in London, Paris, Stockholm, Tokyo, Berlin – and elsewhere. They’re a perk. When individuals or their companies do over a certain amount of net dollar business with us they’re offered free lifelong membership. We encourage them to sponsor their friends and colleagues, who of course pay. We have a lot of members, turn a good profit.’

There were traces of East Coast WASP wrinkling Carver’s otherwise crisp English accent, an unnatural reining in of some vowels and an over-exaggeration of others. English school, Ivy League diploma?

Carver: matinee idol manqué, looks fading agreeably. Max placed him as his age, maybe a year or two younger; balanced diet – healthy. There were frowns on his neck and crow’s feet etched at the ends of his small, sharp blue eyes. With his golden skin he could have passed for white South American – Argentinian or Brazilian – bloodlines all the way back to Germany. Untouchably handsome, but for his mouth. That let him down. It resembled a long razor cut where the blood has just started to bubble but not yet run over.

The coffee came in a white porcelain pot. Max poured himself a cup and added in a measure of cream from a small jug. The coffee was rich and strong and the cream didn’t leave a greasy slick on the surface; it was connoisseur stuff, the kind you bought by the bean and ground yourself, not the mongrel brews you picked up in the supermarket.

‘Me too,’ Max countered curtly. He let the subject die in the air, then got down to business. ‘You said you had a job you wanted me to look at?’

Carver told him about Charlie. Max heard the basics and told him flat out no. Carver mentioned the money and Max quietened up, more out of shock than greed. In fact greed didn’t even enter into it. While Carver was talking numbers he handed Max a brown A4 envelope. Inside were two glossy black-and-white photographs, a headshot and a full-length bodyshot – of a little girl.

‘I thought you said your son was missing, Mr Carver?’ Max said, holding up the picture.

‘Charlie had a thing about his hair. We nicknamed him Samson because he wouldn’t let anyone go near it. He was born – somewhat unusually – with a full head of the stuff. It covered his face like a caul. I remember when they tried to cut it in hospital, he screeched – this deafening howl of pain. It was terrifying. And it was like that afterwards, whenever anyone tried to sneak up on him with a pair of scissors. We left it alone. He’ll outgrow the phobia eventually,’ Carver said.

Max thought he saw Carver’s face change for an instant, as a shadow of humanity stole away a fragment of his all-business composure. It wasn’t enough to make him warm to his potential client, but it was a start.

Max studied the headshot. Charlie didn’t look anything like his father. His eyes and hair were very dark and he had a large mouth with full lips. He wasn’t smiling. He looked pissed off, a great man interrupted in the middle of his work. It was a very adult look. His stare was intense and stark. Max could feel it prodding at his face, humming on the paper, nagging at him.

The second photograph showed Charlie standing in front of some bougainvillea bushes with almost the same expression on his face. His hair was long all right, bow-tied into two drooping bunches that poured over his shoulders. He was wearing a floral-patterned dress, with frills on the sleeves, hem and collar.

‘It’s none of my business and I ain’t no psychologist, but that’s a sure as shit way to fuck a kid’s head up, Carver,’ Max said, hostility upfront.

‘People are very backward in Haiti. Even the most sophisticated, well-educated sorts believe in all kinds of rubbish – superstitions –’

‘We call it vodou. Haitians are ninety per cent Catholic and a hundred per cent vodouiste, Mr Mingus. There’s nothing sinister about it – no more than say, worshipping a half-naked man nailed to a cross, drinking his blood and eating his flesh.’

He studied Max’s face for a reaction. Max stared right back at him, impassive. Carver could have worshipped Safeway carts for all he cared. One person’s God was another person’s idea of a good joke, as far as he was concerned.

He looked back at the photograph of Charlie in his dress. You poor kid, he thought.

‘We’ve looked everywhere for him,’ Carver said. ‘We ran a campaign in early 1995 – newspaper and TV ads, billboards with his picture on them, radio spots – everything. We offered a substantial reward for information, or, better still, for Charlie himself. It had predictable consequences. Every lowlife suddenly came out from under a rock and claimed they knew where “she” was. Some even claimed they’d kidnapped “her” and made ransom demands, but it was all – the sums they wanted were trivial, way too small. Obviously I knew they were lying. These peasants in Haiti can’t see past the ends of their noses. And their noses are very flat.’

Bait and hook, Max thought. Don’t go there. You’ll get drawn into a pissing contest. Still he was curious. How many people had already worked on the case? Why had they failed? And how many were out there now?

‘Don’t get ahead of yourself. Right now we’re just having a conversation,’ Max said. Carver was stung, brought down to a level he usually didn’t frequent. He must have been surrounded by the sort of people who laughed at all his jokes. That was the thing about the very rich, the rich born and bred: they swam in their own seas and didn’t breathe the same air as everybody else; they lived parallel, insulated lives, immune to the struggles and failures that shape character. Had Carver ever been forced to wait until next month’s pay cheque for a new pair of shoes? Been turned down by a woman? Had repo men knocking on his door? Hardly.

Carver told him about the danger, brought up the predecessors again, hinted that bad things had happened to them. Max still didn’t rise to it. He’d gone into the meeting thirty per cent decided he wasn’t taking the job. Now he was almost at the fifty per cent mark.

Carver clocked his indifference and switched his talk to Charlie – when he’d taken his first steps, how he had an ear for music – and then he went into a bit more detail about Haiti.

Max listened, feigning interest with a fixed look, but behind it he was going away, back into himself, delving, working out if he could still cut it.

He came up strangely empty, unresolved. The case had two obvious angles – financial motive or some possible voodoo bullshit. No ransom, so that left the latter, which he knew a bit more about than he’d let on to Carver. Or maybe Carver knew about him and Solomon Boukman. In fact, he was certain Carver did know about that. Of course he did. How couldn’t he, if he had Torres on his payroll? What else did Carver know about him? How far back had he gone? Did he have something stored up, ready to spring on him?

Bad start, if he wanted to take it further. He didn’t trust his future client.

Max ended their meeting telling Carver he’d think about it. Carver gave him his card and twenty-four hours to make up his mind.

He thought about ten million dollars and what he could do. He’d sell the house and buy a modest apartment somewhere quiet and residential, possibly in Kendall. Or maybe he’d move out to the Keys. Or maybe he’d leave Miami altogether.

Then he thought about going to Haiti. Would he have taken the case in his pre-con prime? Yes, certainly. The challenge alone would have appealed to him. No forensics to fall back on and cut corners with, just pure problem-solving, brain work, his wits pitted against another’s. But he’d mothballed his talents when he’d gone to prison and they’d quietly wasted away with inattention, same as any muscle. A case like Charlie Carver’s would be up the hill backwards, the whole way.

He didn’t have any children. He’d never cared for kids all that much. They tried his patience and fried his nerves. Nothing would piss him off more than being stuck in a room with a crying baby its parents couldn’t or wouldn’t shut up. And yet, ironically, many of his private cases had involved finding missing children, some mere toddlers. He had a hundred per cent success rate. Alive or dead, he always brought them home. He wanted to do the same for Charlie. He was worried that he couldn’t, that he’d fail him. Those eyes, sparkling with precocious rage, were finding him again, all the way across the room. It was stupid but he felt they were calling out to him, imploring him to come to his rescue.

Max went out and tried to find a quiet bar where he could have a drink and think things through, but everywhere he passed was full of people, most of them a generation younger than him, most of them happy and loud. Bill Clinton had been re-elected President. Celebrations everywhere. Not his scene. He decided to buy a bottle of Jack at a liquor store instead.

While he was looking for a shop he bumped into a guy in a white puffa jacket and ski hat pulled down almost to his eyes. Max apologized. Something fell out of the man’s jacket and landed at the man’s feet. A clear plastic ziplock bag with five fat joints rolled tampon-style. Max picked it up and turned to give it to the man but he was gone.

He slipped the joints into his coat pocket and carried on walking until he found a liquor store. They were out of Jack. They had other bourbons, but nothing came close to a hit of Jack.

Back in the day, Max Mingus and his partner Joe Liston had liked nothing better than to unwind with a little reefer they got off a snitch dealer called Five Fingers. Five’d feed them certified busts and throw in a few free ounces of Caribbean Queen – a very potent strain of Jamaican grass he used himself.

It was the best shit Max had ever had, way better than the year-old garbage he’d just smoked.

An hour later he was sat on his bed, staring intently at the wall, vaguely aware of the lurchy feeling in his stomach.