Vanished dr-3

by Tim Weaver

  ‘But if he is?’

  She had a look on her face now that I’d most often seen in the grieving: all greyness and distance, like there wasn’t enough thread in the world to stitch her life back together. Her loss was incomplete. A circle that didn’t join. Until there was a body, until there was a reason, there was no closure. It was the heart of missing persons.

  ‘I want to know where he went,’ she said finally.

  As I watched the faint trace of tears in her eyes, the grief, the anger, I decided not to tell her about who Sam really was. That time would come. But it wasn’t now.

  Eventually, she looked up. ‘Will you find him for me?’

  ‘Let’s be really clear on something first. You holding back all this information because you think it will somehow affect the way I do my job – it just means it takes longer to find him, and you have to pay me more money. It’s insane. I get sick of people lying to me, but I accept it as part of my job. What I can’t accept is being lied to by the one person I expect to tell me the truth. So, if you do it again, I walk.’

  She nodded.

  I let the silence sit there between us, let her chew on my anger, and then I got out my notepad and flipped it open. ‘Did Sam ever tell you about a fight he was involved in?’

  ‘A fight?’

  ‘At Gloucester Road Tube station, back in October 2010.’

  Recognition sparked in her face. ‘Oh right, yes. He was interviewed by the police about that. The whole thing was ridiculous. He was trying to act as peacemaker.’

  ‘Did he ever mention a guy called Duncan Pell?’

  ‘Was he the one who worked for London Underground?’

  ‘Yeah. You remember him?’

  ‘Of course. They met up one time.’

  That stopped me. ‘Who – Pell and Sam?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They knew each other?’

  ‘Yes. Duncan was really grateful to Sam for helping him out because things got quite nasty in that fight. So he offered to buy Sam a drink. And Sam accepted.’

  35

  The extra CCTV footage from Ewan Tasker turned up at 9 a.m the next morning. It had been sent in a plain envelope, with no return address. Inside were two unmarked DVDs. Liz had left early to prep a case, even though it was a Saturday, so I set to work straight away, firing up my Mac and playing the first disc.

  The footage from 14 October 2010.

  The fight at Gloucester Road.

  In the desktop folder, Task appeared to have got me the whole week, 11 October through to 17 October. Each sub-folder contained a different day. Alongside the folders was a Word document, which turned out to be a note from him: ‘Had to get a week here – once you go back further than a year it’s saved in seven-day blocks.’ I double-clicked on 14 October. Inside were two different video files: 5 a.m.–2 p.m.; 2 p.m.–12 a.m. I opened the 5 a.m.–2 p.m. footage and then dragged the slider forward to 7.30.

  At 7.33 a.m., Duncan Pell drifted into view. He came from the left-hand side of the camera, up from the booth he’d been in when I’d talked to him at the station. He was focused on something: head still, eyes fixed, cutting through the crowds like a knife.

  Then I realized what he was doing.

  There were three doors into the ticket hall. At the left-hand one, propped against a sandy brick pillar, was a man holding a piece of cardboard. It was difficult to make him out at first, but as Pell arrived he shifted around and I saw him more clearly: not all that old – forty maybe – but dishevelled, dirty, cloaked in a long winter coat and a thick roll-neck sweater, with dark trousers and dark boots. He had a beard, unruly, uncared for, and a black holdall on the floor next to him.

  The slightly washed-out quality of the footage made it hard to see the writing on the cardboard, but I could make out one of the words right at the top. Homeless. I leaned in even closer as Pell started talking to him. After a minute, Pell was gesturing, pointing over the homeless man’s shoulder, then – when the man didn’t appear to get the message – he started jabbing a finger into the man’s arm as if delivering a warning. After that, the man shrank a little, the resolve disappearing, and he bent down, picked up his holdall and moved off. Within a couple of seconds, he was gone from view.

  Pell returned to his booth, out of sight.

  Three minutes later, at 7.41, two men entered the station.

  They were laughing at something. One of them was tall, skinny, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with a thin jacket – all despite the cold – the other smaller, but not by much, and dressed more practically: a thick coat over denims and white trainers. I didn’t know what James Quinn and Robert Stonehouse looked like, but these two seemed a decent fit: they had small, combative faces, they were the only men I’d seen enter the station together in the fifteen minutes I’d been watching, and as I saw one of them take out an Oyster card and gesture towards the self-service machines, a well-dressed black guy arrowed in from the right of the picture and nipped into the queue in front of them.

  Simon Mbebeni.

  Over the phone, PC Brian Westerley said the official police report had Stonehouse as the instigator, and I watched as the taller of the two men – the one wearing a T-shirt and summer jacket – said something to his friend. Mbebeni turned around, frown on his face, and spoke to them. Stonehouse smiled at Mbebeni and shrugged. Mbebeni – six foot, around fifteen stone, plainly not about to be intimidated – took another step towards them. And then Stonehouse threw a punch.

  It missed Mbebeni and he moved quickly to react: he pushed Stonehouse back into a ticket machine on the right, Quinn getting knocked aside on the way through. Stonehouse came back, fists swinging, and connected with Mbebeni’s face. A second later, as the footage glitched a little, I could see blood all over Mbebeni’s shirt.

  Then, from the top of the picture, came Sam Wren.

  At first he seemed oblivious to what was going on, checking his phone, but then he looked up and was pulled right into the eye of the storm. As Stonehouse and Mbebeni squared off again, Quinn stepped back into Sam. All around the ticket hall, people had stopped and backed away, some looking on in horror, others faintly amused. Quinn turned to see who he’d bumped into, Sam said something – an automatic reaction to being hit – and Quinn punched him. It was just like a lot of fights: created out of nothing. Sam clutched his face and took a couple of steps back.

  Then he moved towards Quinn.

  I paused the video. This was only the second time I’d seen Sam in motion. I’d looked at photographs of him over and over, and I’d watched footage of him disappearing into thin air. But now here he was, a different man at a different time. He looked bigger around the face, healthier, but he also looked more assertive, more forceful, and not only because he’d just been attacked. Maybe this was the Sam everyone talked about: the one who worked as an investment banker, who earned six-figure bonuses, who could swim with the sharks. At the end he was none of those things. At the end he was small, confused and forlorn. A man with none of the fight left in him.

  I started the video again. Within a couple of seconds, Pell emerged from the same position as earlier, heading towards Stonehouse and Mbebeni, and then Sam was on Quinn – Quinn half turned away from him – and throwing a punch. It looked clumsy, but because of Quinn’s position, it was devastating: it connected with Quinn’s throat, and – in the blink of an eye – his legs gave way and he hit the floor. It was difficult to make out Sam’s face after that: he was bent over, hands on his knees, blood dripping from his face to the floor, as more Tube staff emerged. One made for Quinn, the other for Stonehouse.

  Except Pell already had Stonehouse.

  Mbebeni was somewhere off to the side, leaning against a wall, looking dazed. Stonehouse was wrestling with Pell, the two of them locked together, arms on each other’s shoulders, gritted teeth, fierce, unrelenting expressions like neither of them was about to give in. Finally, Pell got the better of Stonehouse: he swept his legs out from under him – a quick, efficient mo
vement – and Stonehouse hit the deck hard. I remembered for a moment what Westerley had told me about Pell being an ex-soldier, and that immediately seemed obvious in how he moved, in how precise he was. But as the clock rolled on, as I expected Pell to suppress his opponent and keep him there until he had help, he instead went on the attack. When Stonehouse hit the floor, Pell clamped a hand around his throat and jabbed a fist into the side of Stonehouse’s face. Once. Twice. Three times. Stonehouse was done already, limp and unresponsive, but Pell just continued punching, over and over, even as Stonehouse lay there unconscious, until finally, like a light switching off, he stopped, got up and looked down, a foot placed either side of the body.

  About ten seconds later, a couple of cops rushed in through the doors at the front of the station, and Pell stepped away from the body for the first time, straightening out his jacket and looking around the hall. His eyes locked on to Sam, and he moved across and said something to him. Sam looked up at him, as if he didn’t know who Pell was or what he wanted, then he seemed to process whatever it was that Pell had asked, and started nodding slowly. A few seconds later, Sam pointed to Quinn on the floor. He must have known by then that he’d done some serious damage to him. Quinn hadn’t moved an inch.

  But it was Pell I couldn’t take my eyes off.

  As Sam stood there, his hands still on his knees, in shock and worried about what he might have done, Pell was looking off towards Stonehouse with nothing in his face at all.

  No emotion. No regret.

  As if he didn’t feel anything.

  36

  After seeing him in action, I figured the rest of the footage on the DVD would give an even better sense of who Duncan Pell was. For Sam, the pattern mostly remained the same: he’d come in through the three-arch entrance at Gloucester Road and head across the ticket hall towards the turnstiles. The only day that changed was the day after the fight. Sam didn’t turn up at all. I assumed that was down to the events of the previous twenty-four hours: he’d been in a fight, he’d punched a man unconscious and the police had probably warned him it might be about to get worse. He would have been shaken up by what happened, which is why he must have taken the day off work.

  But Duncan Pell was different.

  He came to work the next day, and every morning – just as on the morning of the fight – he’d stick to the same routine: head for the front of the station where the homeless man had returned, and ask him to leave. Except he didn’t just ask. Every day he became a little more aggressive: only pointing and gesturing initially; then actually planting a hand on the man and pushing him away from the entrance; then grabbing him off the floor and dragging him along the pavement until they both disappeared from sight. Finally, Pell resorted to another tactic: he dropped to his haunches, the man slumped at one of the entrances, and Pell leaned in to him and said something into his ear. The reaction was instant: the homeless man glanced at Pell like he couldn’t believe what he’d heard, and Pell grabbed him by the arm, hauled him to his feet and threw him off, out of view. The man’s black holdall remained in shot for a moment, before Pell kicked it off in the direction he’d thrown the man.

  No other Tube employee got involved at any point. Only Pell. Some looked on, but none of them said anything. But then, on the final day of footage, something changed: the man didn’t turn up. For the first time in a week, presumably the first time in a long time, he wasn’t sitting at the entrance, knees to his chest, fingers clasping his cardboard sign.

  He was gone.

  I made some lunch for Liz and me, and then we sat out on the decking at the back of the house and had a couple of glasses of wine. It was a beautiful day: beyond the trees at the bottom of the garden, the markless sky was vast.

  ‘You found your guy yet?’ Liz asked after a while.

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  A long pause. I looked at her.

  ‘Do you think this is the one?’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She shifted forward in her seat. ‘The one you can’t save.’

  There was no malice in the comment. No bitterness. Liz wasn’t like that. And yet I saw where the words had come from. I could trace them all the way back to their origins; to an interview room in east London eight months before when she’d told me who I was: a man trying to fix holes in the world that couldn’t be fixed. Sometimes I worried our relationship had become defined by that conversation.

  ‘I don’t give it a lot of thought,’ I said eventually, reaching over and taking her hand. But it wasn’t much of a lie. We could both see through it to what lay beneath. All the doubts and fears about what we had – and whether it could go the distance.

  37

  Fifty minutes later, a car pulled up at the front gates. At first I thought it was Ewan Tasker, but then realized it wasn’t a Porsche. A man in his fifties, gunmetal-grey hair and a moustache to match, got out of a Volvo and came up the drive. I moved to the front steps.

  ‘Afternoon,’ he said.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  In his hands was a Manila file.

  He stopped about six feet short of me, hitching a foot up on to the first step, and eyed the front of the house. ‘My name’s Detective Sergeant Kevin Sallows.’

  I nodded. ‘What can I do for you?’

  He didn’t ask me who I was, which meant he already knew. ‘Sorry about intruding like this,’ he continued, even though he didn’t seem sorry. ‘I’ve got a few questions I was hoping you might be able to answer. I know it’s a Saturday, the sun’s out and there’s beer to be drunk. They won’t take long.’

  I opened my hands. ‘Sure. If I can help, I will.’

  He tapped the file against his thigh and cleared his throat. ‘Yesterday we arrested someone called Eric Gaishe.’ My heart sank. He paused, looked at me, but couldn’t see anything worth stopping for. ‘A real arsehole. No education, no job as far as we can tell, no home address. He hasn’t said anything since we brought him in, other than one minor slip-up when he told us some guy called Ben Richards dumped him at a warehouse in Kennington.’

  So Gaishe hadn’t mentioned Wellis, or his connection to the events at the house, even though Wellis had hung him out to dry. Maybe it was out of some skewed kind of loyalty. Or maybe Gaishe was scared about what Wellis might do to him if he talked.

  ‘Thing is, guys like Gaishe are a waste of oxygen: record as long as my arm, nothing to contribute to society. If some bloke took it upon himself to go all Charles Bronson, then that’s fine by me. It’s just one less piece of shit for me to scoop up.’

  He paused, forefinger tapping out a rhythm on the file.

  ‘But yesterday we found Gaishe’s prints all over a house just off the Old Kent Road, near The Firs. We also found some weapons in a holdall. You know The Firs?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Where dreams go to die.’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘House belongs to an Adrian Wellis.’

  I looked at him.

  ‘You heard that name before?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Not sure if he lived there, or if he just rented it to Gaishe. Difficult to tell when Gaishe is playing dumb. Wellis seems pretty kosher – no record, properties across the city – so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for now. But you never know people – not really – do you, Mr Raker?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘There was a girl inside that house,’ he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘Gaishe kept her locked up in there. Raped her. Beat her. Almost killed her.’ So she wasn’t dead. I’d made the right decision. ‘Someone called an ambulance for her from the phone in the house, and it wasn’t Gaishe. So who could this mystery man have been?’ He finally flipped open the front of the file and tapped a finger on the top sheet. ‘Says here you have a habit of stumbling across crime scenes, Mr Raker.’

  It was my file.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t ne
ed to explain.’ He was referring to a case the October before. His eyes flicked up at me. ‘Says here that, on 23 October of last year, you turned up at a house up in north London and there were two dead bodies inside.’

  I gazed at him. ‘If that what it says, it must be true.’

  He didn’t say anything else, just scanned the rest of the file. When he was done, he took a step back from the porch. ‘Most civilians go their whole lives without reporting a crime like your one.’ Sallows looked at me again, and I got the sense this was somehow personal for him, that he’d specifically asked to be here. Have we crossed paths before? ‘I mean, it’s a hell of a thing, stumbling across a scene like the one you found, right?’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s the nature of my work, sadly.’

  ‘Missing persons?’

  ‘People who are missing for a long time tend not to turn up alive.’

  ‘But you have to admit you’re like a magnet for trouble.’

  ‘Why would I have to admit that?’ I said to him. ‘If you’re accusing me of something, then come out with it. Otherwise, I think we’re done.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘You found that farm up in Scotland.’

  It had been eighteen months since I’d walked on to that farm and almost lost my life, and the scars on my body remained. Not as painful as they once were, because all pain died in time, but a reminder of what had been done to me, like a memory that would never fade. Sallows looked down at the first two fingers of my left hand, where the nails would never grow back, and then up to me.

  ‘That case …’ He stopped, shook his head, and his eyes flicked to me again. ‘I read some of the paperwork. I read your interviews, the statement you made, what you said went on up there. I was interested because, at the time, I had this religious nut going round killing people and dumping their bodies in Brockwell Park, and I thought to myself, “Maybe my case is related.” ’ He paused, studied me again. ‘It wasn’t, by the way.’