Chapter One

A detective’s first thought when someone disappears is murder. His second is acquaintance-involvement.

There is usually a body in cases of murder; in cases of mysterious disappearance the missing person is simply that, missing.

Detectives, in the main, are ill-equipped to deal with this kind of problem: solutions cannot be found by scanning news reports or CCTV footage or by searching the computer hard-drives of the disappeared for email contacts.

They’ve been levering away for hours now and still they don’t get any answers. I’m not deliberately holding anything back; I really don’t have anything to tell them.

I think there are five, maybe six guys, but only two at a time. They all have different routines and the pairs are mixed and matched, but they all look the same.

On the desk are several objects I’ve never seen before: a green disposable lighter, a Clipper; a British Passport; an open wallet containing a driver’s licence and some cash and credit cards.

They keep shuffling them around, changing their positions on the desk as if to prioritize the significance of each one.

I’m struggling just to understand the questions.

Who is Gerald Anthony Cox? How did I come by his passport? How come it bears my photograph? It’s a fake passport, why do I have it?

Gerald Anthony Cox flew business class from JFK to London Heathrow on February 25th. There is CCTV footage of me checking in for the same flight and going through immigration at Heathrow.

I used this passport.

It’s a serious offence to enter the UK using false documents.

I’m a British citizen, not wanted by either UK or American or any other law enforcement agencies, they’ve checked.

‘So why would you want to assume a false I.D., Jon?’

‘Did you use the passport to obtain the credit cards and the driver’s licence?’

‘Who supplied the phoney I.D., Jon? It’s a good job, very professional, high quality. How much did you pay?’

‘Didn’t come cheap, I’ll guess.’

‘Must have had a pretty pressing reason to want to be somebody else, huh, Jon, a guy like you?’

‘Why, Jon?’

I tell them, look, this has happened before, it’s all medically documented, vital information is missing, like where I’ve been the past few months, who I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, who’s been doing what to me.

I’m sorry, I just don’t know. I was in New York. Someone drove me to the airport. After that, nada.

There’s a Doctor Wayne-Grove, my family shrink. Maybe he can explain.

Then they leave me alone for what seems like hours but probably isn’t. I have no concept of time anymore.
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The young, dark guy with the bootlace moustache and the brown linen suit comes in. This time he’s doubling up with the fat middle aged guy whose trousers don’t fit.

His voice is confident but soft. I file him as media-trained. If they were playing good cop / bad cop he’d be the former.

‘I’m a fan, Jon. I like your work,’ offering me a cigarette.

‘Yeah,’ says the fat guy, but without the sincerity that is clearly his partner’s favourite shtik, ‘without you Tommy Devine would be a nobody.’

This may be true. Tommy Devine is ugly. You want to know how ugly? I’ll tell you. When he’s born (series one, episode one) the midwife, a twenty-eight year old gay sudoku enthusiast from Ohio, threatens to assassinate his mother.

When he sees it he just falls apart, it’s like he takes it personally, you know? Like little Tommy has pissed all over his parade and it’s the mother’s fault.

‘How could you do this?’ he screeches at her. ‘I mean, how?’ tossing his facemask and surgical gloves to the floor with pantomime-dame-theatricality. ‘I mean, at some point during the last nine months… well you must have had some idea. You had scans, didn’t you? Surely you couldn’t have carried that thing around for nine months and not known, suspected even… Couldn’t you have done the decent thing? Have you never heard of termination?’

The mother, a giant hover-fly, passes out. Her wings collapse, creating a huge draught, which blows the anaesthetist off his feet and scatters instruments, swabs, wipes, anything that isn’t tied down, all over the theatre.

‘Ho hum,’ sighs the midwife, ‘you chase a horse and you catch a dog. Story of my life.’

Tommy plays all the parts. That’s Tommy World. Every character in every show looks like some version of Tommy.

That first script earns me a personal assistant called Dragona Hartly.

Dragona believes in absolutes and, like Tommy she loves to generalise. For example, did you know that gangsters use the word fuck more than any other word, with the possible exceptions of money and no?

And that gangsters in the main don’t have what you could call a good command of English? Yeah, like comics and P.A.s.

‘You know why?’ Tommy asks me at out first meeting, ‘I’ll tell you why…’ breathing cigar smoke and garlic all over my new wool suit. ‘It’s because they’re all spiritual Italians and Greeks. And the ones that ain’t, actually are, in that spiritual sense. You get me?’

I don’t but I nod anyway.

He continues: ‘It’s that cultural thing about body language that the spiritual Italians and the spiritual Greeks share with the Italians from Italy and the Greeks from Greece – the hand gestures and stuff.

It’s the same with accountants – spiritually they’re all Jews.’

Then his eyes narrow, his head tilts to one side like the head of a curious dog and he peers at me square in the face through the miasma of cigar smoke, garlic and bullshit:

‘You want to know something about writers? I’ll tell you about writers. All writers drink in the afternoon. Did you know that? All writers are drunks – even the ones who don’t drink.’

‘When did you last see Tommy, Jon,’ continues Bootlace.

Ill-fitting trousers lights my cigarette.

We meet at happy hour in the Cellar Bar at the Bryant on West Fortieth. I don't know how long ago. I have no concept of time anymore. Dragona is there, and an ex-cop called Marsham.

It’s not a good meeting from the start and it spirals quickly downwards after I outline my plans. I tell Tommy it’s time for me to move on, there’s a novel I’ve wanted to write for twenty years and now is the time. I'm going to kill him off. This series has to be the last.

I’m hung over from lunch so I don’t eat, just order a beer and a large Irish.

Tommy gets angry, talks a lot about breach of contract and lawyers. I remind him that no contract has ever existed between us.

Anyway, it ends badly and Tommy and Marsham leave. Then Dragona tells me she’s going to the washroom. She doesn’t return.

Happy hour is on me.

My beer and whiskey costs me $150 and some change.

‘I’m not sure,’ I tell the cop, ‘I think we had dinner…’

‘Before you drifted?’ interrupts the fat guy. I nod.

Just get Wayne-Grove.

According to Doctor Wayne-Grove, drift is not a psychiatric problem. The way he sees it, there have always been people whose experience of reality differs from that of the majority, and there has always been an overlap between the gifted or insightful and the mentally ill.

A critic once writes that I am ‘rich, famous and strange’. He would no doubt disagree with Wayne-Grove. Nowhere in his piece does he mention talent or insight.

Something extraordinary happens to me when I’m young. It makes me strange.

Then my father dies and his death makes me rich.

Writing for Tommy Devine makes me famous.

I do not recall a time before the strangeness, therefore it is not possible for me to say with certainty that there ever is such a time.

The fat detective gives me another cigarette and Bootlace tells me they’ve contacted the shrink and they’re done for the moment but we’ll need to talk again.

‘Are you going to tell me what this is about?’ I ask.

‘You don’t know?’ He smiles and leaves.

I finish my cigarette and stub it out, the act causing me to ponder the possibility that one day this is all going to end.