by Tim Weaver
By the point I’d actually realized he was on my other side, it was already too late: a hand clamped on to the back of my skull, holding it in place, forcing me to face forward. The power in his hands was immense.
‘I’m not really a boxer, David,’ he said flatly. ‘A sport in which you’re confined to twenty-four square feet of space – I mean, where’s the fun in that? No, the reason I lose weight and gain it again isn’t because I’m training for fights. It’s because weight – or the lack of it – has proved to be an effective disguise on the rare occasions when I’ve allowed myself to be photographed in public. People can’t get the measure of you when you never look quite the same. A beard, or not. A new hairstyle, or a shaved head. Those things help. But you know what the greatest disguise of all is, David? You know what convinces people more quickly than almost anything else?’ He dug his nails so hard into my scalp I could feel them draw blood. ‘It’s the way a person talks.’
He released his grip and came around to the side of me, and as I looked at Robert Zaid, as I processed what he’d just said to me, it hit me like a sledgehammer.
I finally understood why the photos on the wall of the living room felt wrong.
I understood why there was only a single picture of his parents.
I knew the nanny who Zaid had been photographed with as a boy wasn’t a nanny at all, and I knew why – the moment I’d entered the house – I’d felt so strongly that I’d met him before, even though I hadn’t: because I’d seen his picture in a police file.
‘It’s the way a person talks,’ he repeated, slower, smiling this time.
But now his accent wasn’t English.
It was American.
Because this wasn’t Robert Zaid.
It was Adrian Vale.
Part Eight
* * *
THE FOREST
I can hear a noise again.
But it’s different.
It’s not coming from down here.
It’s coming from above me.
I tilt my head slightly, trying to give myself the best chance I can of hearing whatever it is, but the moment I do, the noise stops.
When it does, all that’s left is a ringing in my ears, a faint background noise that I’ve slowly got used to after weeks in the silence of this place. But now it acts as interference, an intrusive element that makes me less confident about what I’m hearing from above. Is something finally happening? Is he coming for me?
Or is it a fault in my ears?
In my head?
Is everything I’m hearing – as I’d always feared – entirely built in my mind? The thought scares me, because my mind used to be everything to me. It was what defined me, what I used to survive and stay ahead.
It was how I found missing people.
When Derryn was dying, her body, and then her voice, and then her breath, fading into memory as she was swallowed by a disease I couldn’t fight for her, my lucidity was how I survived. And nearly a decade on, before this darkness, it was still keeping me safe: my days and nights were still filled with the faces of the missing, with the echoes of their voices, with stories in whose tragedy I sometimes saw no light. Deep down, I knew that finding people allowed me to fix things: the ragged fractures created by a disappearance; the ambiguity when someone vanished; the continual, unanswered sense of loss. Sometimes, when I brought people home alive, I got to raze grief to the ground entirely. I wanted families to feel that. I wanted them to remember what it was like to breathe, because when you lose someone you love, it just completely hollows you out.
You barely exhale; you barely exist.
I never wanted anyone else to feel the way I did.
So, even in times when I’ve doubted myself, when I’ve glimpsed the absolute darkness in men, the terrible things they’re capable of doing to one another and the tremors their choices leave behind, I’ve had my mind. I’ve had a clarity of purpose. I’ve kept working, searching, taking the next case, and the next, and the next. And when the police would hit a wall, when the questions were thriving like weeds, I was always there for the families with a way forward.
But where is the way forward from here?
How do I fix this?
How will I ever find my way home?
58
For what felt like weeks, all I knew was darkness and silence.
In a place bereft of light and sound, I had no choice but to replay the moments before he’d drugged me, pausing and rewinding the image of him standing next to me; of my wrists and ankles bound to a chair; of him speaking to me in an accent he’d kept hidden for nearly twenty-nine years. On some level, I started to wonder if maybe I’d known what was coming before it had even got to that; maybe I’d seen through the disguise the second I stood in front of the photos that had covered an entire wall of his home.
But, if I had, I’d been too slow to stop him.
Instead, imprisoned in a blackness I couldn’t escape from, I started putting it all together in my head, a jigsaw puzzle of stitched pieces that I grew to know intimately. The disappearance of Beatrix Steards in London at the start of 1987. Nine people vanishing from a remote village in Yorkshire. And, somewhere among it all, the body of a man on a beach in Sussex in October 1989.
Back then, DNA analysis was still in its infancy.
And that was exactly how he’d got away with it.
Because it was only being used in high-priority cases at the time, the suicide of a depressed student, his corpse discovered – decomposed and forgotten – at the bottom of a five-hundred-foot cliff face, was never going to make the cut. It appeared open and shut. The victim had a wallet on him, containing ID, there was a half-finished suicide note confirming other personal details, and what hadn’t yet decayed into the shingle bore a striking similarity to Adrian Vale.
Not only were Adrian Vale and Robert Zaid a close match in terms of build – in adulthood, Zaid had filled out, shaking off the boyishness of his youth – Zaid also happened to be, like Vale, olive-skinned, dark-eyed and dark-haired. He was half Iranian, Vale was Latino, but while their roots were thousands of miles apart, their colouring and physiques were nearly identical. The fact that, when investigators found the body, the teeth had been smashed during the fall only helped muddy the waters even more: dental tests proved inconclusive, but inconclusive was exactly what the teeth were going to be when a body hit the floor, face first, at ninety miles per hour.
Having inherited a fortune after his parents’ deaths, Zaid was living the sort of lifestyle that Vale envied and would never have. And so with Vale’s own mother dead by that time, and no other attachments in his life – nothing to draw him back to LA, especially with Joline Kader still sniffing around him – Vale made his move.
He killed Robert Zaid.
And then became him.
It was why Vale drifted away from anyone he’d attended King’s College with – not, as he claimed to Patrick Perry during their Skype call in 2015, because they were all so upset about Beatrix Steards going missing, but because Vale knew that the other people on the course would ID him the moment they saw him pretending to be Zaid. It was why Vale also withdrew almost entirely from the public eye, why he hated having his photograph taken or posted anywhere, and it was also likely to be why he’d taken up a role at the Foreign Office. It was a move I hadn’t been able to figure out: Zaid had so much money – why would he work for the FCO?
The answer was simple.
It wasn’t Zaid.
Vale’s time in government, especially at the start, had given him all the breathing room he’d needed. He’d deliberately got himself posted abroad for the first decade after Zaid’s murder, working in countries where no one knew him or had met him before. By the time he came back to the UK, the lie was so embedded and he’d so successfully severed any connections to Zaid’s former life back home that he settled into his existence in Britain totally unhindered, and with no one suspecting a thing.
He took Zaid’s money, his inherit
ance and his identity, and he lived a life that didn’t belong to him. The one photograph on his wall at home of the actual Zaid, with his parents at the house in Marbella, was just for show, for the rare visitors he had. Zaid and Vale had looked enough alike as kids for any disparities to pass relatively unnoticed, especially at a superficial glance – or, as with me, for people to note that something wasn’t right in the pictures on that wall, but not be certain of exactly what.
The photos of Vale’s mother that were mounted among the others – the woman I thought had been a nanny in the real childhood pictures of Vale – were what really mattered to him. When he’d said to me that his parents were remarkable, he’d never meant his father. His dad was an alcoholic, a failure, lost to him and his mother way before he drank himself to death. His mother, though, was different. As much as it was possible for a person like Adrian Vale to love someone, he loved her.
It might have been the only authentic thing about him.
Suddenly, I was back.
In the darkness. In the silence.
I was in the same place I’d been kept for weeks, this prison with no doors and no escape. I could still hear the same noise – the fault in my ears, the hum that was either inside my head or somewhere above me. But now something had changed.
Something was different.
It’s the darkness.
It wasn’t much, but it was there: a grey square directly overhead, maybe twenty feet above me, shifting across.
A hatch.
I’m in some kind of hole.
It moved again, opening further, and the minimal, charcoal-coloured light was enough for me to see that I’d been right all along: the roof in here was triangular, too high to reach with just my arms, and there were no doors anywhere, no windows, no exits at ground level.
Only above.
A rope tumbled down from the hatch.
59
The end of the rope hit the floor.
I didn’t move.
I just stood there and watched. I was frightened, frozen. I couldn’t work out what was happening. All this darkness, all this silence – weeks, maybe months of it – and now this.
I stepped closer to the rope.
There were knots all the way up, large enough to get a foot on to and aid an ascent. This system was obviously how the food, the water and the blankets had come in; not this exact rope perhaps, but one like it, secured to some kind of platform or container so that the meagre supplies they left for me could be lowered all the way down.
And always when I was asleep.
If the rope had been dropped in while I was still awake, I’d have noticed the hatch and the marginal change in the light. The fact that I hadn’t made something else obvious: if the supplies only came in once I’d gone to sleep, I was being watched.
There had been cameras in here the whole time.
I grabbed hold of the rope.
Did I go up?
Was it a trap?
I hesitated a moment longer, looking to see if Vale might be waiting out of sight at the top – but then the overwhelming need to escape took over. I had to go up. I had to try and get out of here.
I started climbing.
As I did, I thought of the boxes I’d found at Seiger and Sten, the others who must have spent time here before me. Did they make this climb too?
The closer I got to the hatch, the more I could see of the room around me, the grey light leaking in from above to show a camera – as I’d suspected – off to my right. I only noticed it as I got to the very top, one of my hands gripping the edge of the hatch, the other clamped on the rope. There were no LEDs on the camera, no hint it was there at all, the outside cased in black. For a moment, I looked down into the room I’d been in all this time. I could see the shoes I’d kicked off because they didn’t fit and were too uncomfortable. I could see my discarded blankets. I could see a river of old water bottles flowing against one edge of the room, and then hundreds of paper plates. They were scattered everywhere, a map of my captivity.
I reached towards the hatch with my other hand – and then, finally, lifted myself all the way out.
Breathing hard, I looked around.
I was alone in another room.
It was low-lit and narrow, maybe 120 feet long. The walls were chipboard, the wood scratched and dirty, and there was one other hatch like mine between me and what looked like the exit door. The second hatch was already fully opened, had maybe been that way for some time, rope snaking out of it and clipped to an iron loop bolted to the floor.
Beyond it, the exit door was ajar.
Even in the subdued light, my eyes struggled to adjust after so long in darkness. They watered and blurred, tears breaking out across my cheeks, and as I wiped them away I got to my feet, moving around the other hatch, peering into its empty darkness.
I headed for the door.
It was ajar enough for me to see a sliver of what lay on the other side: some kind of slatted wooden veranda, with a flight of steps down to a sloped patch of grass. Ringing the grass were trees.
Forest.
Where the hell was I?
I placed a hand on the door and pushed at it very gently, trying to give myself a wider view of what awaited. It was either dawn or dusk. The light was weak, the sky like ash, and although I could hear birds far off, the forest was absolutely black beyond the initial treeline. It was cold too. There was no wind yet, but I knew that when it came, it would cut through me like a knife – and as I thought about that, I looked down at myself: I was in a T-shirt and a pair of ill-fitting trousers that weren’t mine. I didn’t have anything on my feet. Not even socks.
I turned, thought about going back for my shoes, but didn’t want to waste time, so pushed at the door instead, inching it open.
Heart beating faster, I moved even further out on to the veranda, the slats creaking under my weight, and glanced both ways: the room with the hatches was part of a bigger structure – some sort of windowless house – but, compared to the immensity of the forest surrounding me, it was just a mote of dust. Everywhere I looked, there were trees, millions of them: immense soldiers in an infinite line.
A thump from somewhere else in the house.
Movement – or maybe a door closing.
I looked behind me for something to use as a weapon, couldn’t see anything, and then switched focus. On the opposite wall to the hatch I’d climbed out of, there was a panel, high up. It was some kind of heating vent. I hurried across to it, reached up and quietly levered the plate off. As I did, I paused; there was no sound from the other side. All I could hear was birdsong, deep into the trees, and then a stark silence.
Wherever I was, it was miles from anywhere.
Placing the panel on the floor, I grabbed the edge of the vent and pulled myself up high enough to see into it. At the other end, vague, gloomy, was another room.
Some kind of lounge.
It was dark but I could make out a stone fireplace, the mouth of the chimney licked black with soot. There was an armchair next to it – pale, threadbare – and a low coffee table stacked with books. A bottle of whisky and a glass were on it.
Movement.
My eyes were drawn to the opposite side, as far to the right as I could see from where I was, and in the murk beyond the fireplace, I realized there was a shape in the shadows, hunched over, leaning on what looked like a walking stick.
Vale.
He was a half-turn away from me, perched on the edge of a dark sofa, a thick winter coat on, a beanie, snow boots.
At his hip was a knife.
The blade glinted despite the lack of light, and that was when I looked at the walking stick again and realized it wasn’t that at all.
It was a rifle.
He was loading it.
60
I headed back out, along the veranda, trying to prevent the wooden slats from moaning under my weight. I ignored the cold, the fact that every inch of exposed skin was freezing and I was starting to lose sensa
tion in my feet, but it was hard: even as I focused on what was ahead, I could feel my teeth wanting to chatter, the gentle vibration of them in my jaw as the air carved through the thin, torn cotton of my clothing like it wasn’t even there.
Ahead of me, the veranda bent around to the right and then continued for another fifteen or twenty feet. I could see a window now, dusty and opaque, and a door. The building looked a lot smaller than I’d imagined: one bedroom, maybe two at most, the living room that I’d seen Vale in, and then probably a kitchen and a bathroom. It was all built from the same dark wood, even the roof. Only the stone chimney that I’d glimpsed through the heating vent in any way deviated from the main design: it broke out like a grey finger, and – from the top – smoke drifted faintly upwards.
Beyond that, it was just forest, so dense and tall that there was no view other than the trees. On the opposite side of the building from where I was, banks of pine were so huge and close to the house that they brushed against the roof, almost seemed to be reaching across it, and whenever the wind picked up, their needles made a soft whisper, like someone was talking to me.
I moved quickly towards the front door, stopping short of the window to look inside. The kitchen was bare and stripped back: to the right, a door exited into a hallway, dark and difficult to make out; to the left, a portable gas stove was on top of one of the worktops, disconnected, a plate beside that – scraped free of food – and a plastic beaker.
Ducking under the sill, I headed to the door.
The wind came again, moving the trees, rousing the voice of the forest – but as soon as it was gone again, there was nothing. No sound at all. No traffic close by, no planes in the sky, no voices. It was eerie, as if we were above the atmosphere, drifting through space: when I moved even slightly, looking around for something I could use as a weapon, the faint wrinkle of my shirt, the soft pop of my stiff, underused joints, shattered the silence. I tensed, waiting for Vale to react, to burst out of the front door – but he didn’t.
