I had the little telephone box in a plastic carrier bag at my feet and nearly forgot it in the press to get out of the carriage. My head wasn’t right. Lack of sleep. Unwelcome thoughts. Dredging up the past was no help to Peter, and it certainly wasn’t helping me. But now that it had started, it wouldn’t stop. In the middle of the night, just to do something, I’d called and left messages at the offices of a half-dozen private detectives suggested by Google. Mr. Hutchinson had been the first to call me back, on the dot of nine, offering to see me at twelve.
The website had shown an aerial photo of the Thames at night, but when I found the address and rang the doorbell, I found myself climbing a dingy, narrow staircase above a fried chicken shop. The beige carpet was tacky underfoot and the whole building, part of a row of three-story late Victorian terraces, seemed imbued with grease. A film of it shimmered on the walls as though the building was sweating it out.
By the time I got to the top, I was unsurprised when Mr. Hutchinson came to the door himself. Unbelievably, a half-eaten box of fried chicken sat on his desk next to a couple of laptops and a phone. The detective clearly outsourced the honey-trapping. Mr. Hutchinson was a slight man, hardly taller than me but a few years older, with a large forehead and bulbous, slightly hunted eyes. A door led off the office, and without looking I knew that behind it would be a single bed, a kitchenette, a bathroom with a fraying towel, a cracked bar of soap, and a single bottle of value shower gel.
“Thank you for fitting me in.” I shook Hutchinson’s hand. He invited me to call him Steven and to sit down.
“It’s a missing person?”
I told him about Patricia’s phone call. Old-school style, he made crabbed notes in a spiral notebook, taking down Peter’s date of birth, address, email, and phone number.
“Corporate law?”
“Yes.”
“And you and Mr. White are close? But not…?”
“Peter is gay.” He paused for a moment and then wrote that down too.
“Do you have the contact details for any of his colleagues?”
I did not. The interview went on. I told him about the wedding, that I believed Peter traveled a lot. I described my visit to Peter’s apartment. In answer to his questions, I said that there was nothing that led me to believe Peter was suicidal, or had problems with drugs, or money, or a relationship. I told him the names of Peter’s boyfriends, Anders the Norwegian, Karsten von Kloss who had been eaten by a cannibal, and by dredging my memory an assortment of first names—Matthew, Patrick, Juan—that could have belonged to anyone.
“Could he have broken the law?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“But you haven’t called the police.”
I hesitated and shifted in my chair. “I thought this might be quicker.”
“In your opinion, as Mr. White’s friend, where do you think he is?”
“Perhaps he’s just gone away somewhere. Perhaps work got too much for him. I don’t think … I don’t think Peter’s very happy. He’s successful but—” I thought of how Peter had looked when I found him in the American Bar, the stillness as he had sat holding the whiskey tumbler with both hands. “People do that sometimes, don’t they? They just walk out on everything all at once, because they don’t know how to do it piece by piece. Your life doesn’t want to let you go. If you think about it too much, it won’t happen. You’ve got colleagues, projects, subscriptions, deliveries, memberships…”
Hutchinson nodded quickly. “And there’s nothing else you can tell me about Mr. White, about Peter, that may help me find him?”
“You don’t need to find him.” Now the detective looked lost. “I mean I just want to be able to tell his mum he’s okay, to know he’s all right. It might not be that difficult. On TV, the police just look at people’s phone records, or their email. I don’t know if that’s something you can do.” My eyes fell on the box of chicken. I could see his teeth marks. He saw me looking and I felt something shift between us. Mr. Hutchinson swallowed.
“What’s in the bag?”
“I found it at Peter’s place.” I was loath for him to see it, but I took it out and when he stretched out his hand, I gave the little telephone box to him.
“What’s this about then?”
I was suddenly overcome by weariness, a tide of it. I could have lain down on his carpet, inhaled the chip fat, and never woken up.
“There was a phone box outside my house when I was growing up. We didn’t have a phone, well, sometimes we did, but we were always getting cut off, so people would call me at the box at prearranged times, or on the off chance. It got burnt down. Like this. People were always vandalizing it.”
“It used to take ages to get connected again after you’d been cut off, didn’t it?”
“Yes.” In my lap, I gripped the strap of my handbag more tightly. A suspicion took shape that there would be other elements of my childhood that Mr. Hutchinson was familiar with: empty cupboards, say, or lying at school about what you got for your birthday. I wished I had waited for one of the other detectives to call back, someone smoother with a fancier office, someone less like a forlorn hedgehog.
“Do you think it’s relevant? The telephone box?”
“I suppose … I suppose Peter might have done it. I didn’t want to think so at the time. But, there was a boy we both liked. It was all very many years ago.”
“Teenage stuff then. Unrelated?”
“It was strange that it was there. Nothing else. There was an accident. Not then, a bit later. It’s all tied up with this place, this manor we used to go to, a game we played. We all felt guilty afterward. It ruined a lot of things, friendships, trust.” I swallowed quickly.
“So he might be upset, then.” Hutchinson put the telephone box down on the table and I scooped it up quickly and put it back in the carrier bag. “Might be … dwelling on the past?”
“Do you usually find them? Missing persons, that is.”
“Most of the time. The kids, teenagers I mean, they can’t keep off Facebook or WhatsApp. Half the time, they post pictures of themselves in their mates’ bedrooms. And then with adults, usually they’re just evading their other half, living half a mile away with someone else. It’s marital, most of it. And people don’t make the effort, they want to use their bank cards.” This had been his opportunity to inspire me with confidence. Instead, he sounded almost disappointed.
“Why do you do it?” The question slipped out. “Be a detective, I mean.”
Mr. Hutchinson blinked slowly. “Why do you do your job?” When I didn’t answer—any satisfactory kind of answer was evading me—he looked down and furrowed his brow. When he looked up, he said, “I like puzzles. Always have. Even though the answers are almost always the most obvious and boring thing you could imagine, there’s a feeling when you’re trying to solve a case, a certain feeling, especially when you’re getting closer, that is. I used to be a chef at a Wetherspoon’s. Nothing wrong with feeding people, especially when they’ve got a couple of pints inside them. This is better.”
After we’d sat with that for a bit, I asked, “What will you do? To find Peter.”