Vanished dr-3

by Tim Weaver

  Then, in front of me, something shifted.

  The phone’s glow didn’t reach the far wall, but something in me – some small voice – said not to go any further. I stood there for a moment, heart thumping in my chest, the smell, almost unbearable now, clawing its way into my nose and mouth and staying there like dust. Then – finally – I stepped forward and, on the edge of the glow, two blobs of light came back. At first I couldn’t see what they were. Then, too late, I realized.

  Boots. Black, with steel toecaps and red stitching.

  Just like Duncan Pell’s.

  He’s in the room with me.

  50

  He launched himself out of the darkness, hood up, leading with his fists. I was barely ready for him, almost side on, but instead of trying to cut me down, he went past me. My body had been prepared for the impact, ready to absorb the blow. Instead, I felt the dead air move, an arm brush mine, and then he was already on the stairs, heading up into the ticket hall above us.

  A second later, I followed.

  As I came out of the bend on the stairs, I saw him exit through the metal grille and head up the stairs to the line. I tried to close the gap but he was fast. Ex-army. Fit. At the stairs I slowed. Up ahead, it was a blind turn back on to the line, so I came up on the left-hand side to avoid being hit or surprised. But there was no one waiting.

  The line was silent.

  I took a couple of steps through the trees to where the old eastbound line met the station house. Nothing now. No sound. No movement. The ground was hard, dried and compact. I moved along it, the platform about five feet above me on the island, glass and dust and brick scattered all over it. Halfway down, I placed both hands on the island and hauled myself up. Next to me, the station creaked in the hot sun. I didn’t move. Just stood there and listened. No sound but the station house, baking in the heat.

  Crack.

  A sound from the other side.

  Glass beneath boots.

  I moved quickly around the front, watching where my feet fell, and stopped at the edge of the building. Then I peered around the corner, along the westbound side.

  No one on the platform.

  No one on the line.

  I came out from behind the station house. About two hundred feet further along, the island became a ramp and dropped down to meet the path. Fifty feet beyond that, the trees began to close in, swallowing the old line whole. There was nothing now. No breeze at all. The only thing that came back were my footsteps, moving across the thin layer of glass and dust. As the island dropped down, the two lines merging into a single path, I saw a flash of movement up ahead.

  I carried on, my feet returning to the grass of the line, weeds crawling through the cracks in the baked earth, masonry kicked off on to the old track from the island. There was so much of it – chunks of brick, shards of roofing, clumps of tile. One wrongly placed foot and my ankle would snap.

  As the trees grew thicker and the shadows longer, there was a subtle change in the atmosphere: the foliage seemed to drop, as if reaching out, and another tunnel emerged, almost from nowhere, like it was part of the trees and grass; all but carved from them. It was as gun-barrel-straight as the last one, but it was even longer, the daylight at its end just a pinprick against a slate-black wall. I walked right up to it, stopping short of its entrance, but the closer I got, the more I started to sense something. Something defective and amiss. Places were shaped and moulded by their history, by the events that had taken place in them, but mostly they were shaped by the people who had passed through them.

  I stepped inside and felt wet mud beneath my feet. The further in I got, the more the temperature seemed to drop. For a moment I felt adrift. My eyes hadn’t adjusted. The ground was uneven and shifting under my boots. I slowed slightly and, as I did, I heard something ahead of me, like footsteps softening, getting further away from me. Then there was no noise at all.

  I stopped.

  ‘Duncan?’

  My voice echoed along the tunnel and then vanished, as if absorbed by the dark. The daylight at the other end was about the size of a dinner plate, but it was below my eyeline, like I was heading down into the earth, rather than over it. I glanced back over my shoulder to where I’d come in: the entrance was about forty yards back, a circle full of trees, and hazy in the distance was the island and station house. I thought briefly about backtracking, about returning to the sunlight – because even after being inside the tunnel for thirty seconds, I could barely see anything; maybe ten feet in either direction.

  Then another sound from in front of me.

  I slowly stepped back, placing my foot as carefully as I could, and felt the heel of my boot disappear into soft mud. There was a gentle sucking sound, barely any noise at all, and yet – in the silence – it was like a scream. Suddenly, there was movement in front of me. As I stepped back again, caught mid-stride, he came out of the darkness, almost ripped from it, and – before I had a chance to react – I was being slammed against the ground, wind fizzing from my body, white spots flashing in front of my eyes.

  A moment of confusion.

  I started to get up, hand flat to the mud path.

  And then a boot swung out of the dark, not even there until it was inches in front of my face, and as I tried desperately to avoid it, the steel toecap connected with the bridge of my nose – and I thumped back violently against the ground for a second time.

  And this time I blacked out.

  When I came round again, I was still in the same place. My head felt like it was on fire, pain in the bridge of my nose, in my forehead, around my eyes. I touched a finger to my face. My nose wasn’t broken, but I could feel wet blood all down my lips and over my chin.

  Getting on to all fours and then slowly, unsteadily, to my feet, I headed back the way I’d come in, eventually hitting the light. It was starting to cool off now, or maybe I was just so coated in cold mud that it only felt that way. As I stood there, wiping the blood and the dirt from my skin, dizziness hit me and a wave of nausea swept through my system. I put a hand to my mouth, trying to push it down, and as I did I realized the smell of the staffroom was still clinging to the inside of my throat, to my mouth and nose.

  A second wave hit me – and this time I was sick.

  When I was done, I wiped my mouth and looked back into the darkness of the tunnel. Pell. If he’d been using the staffroom, he’d been using it for something bad. The room may have been empty, but the smell of death remained, and so did the evidence of suffering. He knew the line. He knew how to navigate it, how to keep its secrets from people, how to use it against me. And he’d be long gone by now.

  But even as I realized that, even as I saw the logic in it, a weird feeling passed over me.

  Like someone was still watching.

  Pell hadn’t returned to his house, although I hadn’t expected him to. I walked down his driveway to the tap and turned it on, washing my face with the lukewarm water. I rinsed off the mud, leaving great big wet patches on my jeans, and then I took off my T-shirt and turned it inside out. It masked some of the bloodstains; enough, at least, not to turn heads on the train ride home. Then, finally, I scrubbed down my boots. When I was done, I turned the tap off and stood there, watching the water run into the gaps between the patio slabs. But even washed down, I could still smell the room on me.

  The blood and the death.

  In my clothes, in the thread and the stitching.

  In my skin.

  51

  For the first time in months, I dreamed. I was hiding behind a door in the bedroom, only able to see two ways: right, through the gap between door and frame; and left to Derryn’s old dresser, where the mirror reflected back the door and the hallway beyond.

  In the darkness of the hallway I could see shapes: figures, one queued behind the other, waiting to enter the bedroom. At first a feeling passed over me – the kind of sixth sense you only gain in dreams – and I told myself, They’re the people you’ve found; the men, the women, t
he kids, all of them tracked down, brought home and returned to the light.

  But then one of the shapes moved away from the group.

  And I realized they weren’t those people at all.

  When I woke, my whole body was slick with sweat, the sheets beneath me wet, the duvet twisted around my legs and my stomach like a cocoon. I kicked it off, sat up and then remained there, perched on the edge of the bed, my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands. Behind me, I felt Liz stir. She made a soft sound, a gentle exhalation, and then her fingers were brushing the small of my back. ‘Are you okay, baby?’ she said quietly.

  I nodded and looked at the clock: 1.21 a.m.

  Her fingers moved across my skin. ‘You’re soaking. Were you dreaming?’

  I turned and looked at her in the darkness of the bedroom. Behind her, the curtains weren’t fully drawn and moonlight poured through the gap in a thin sliver the shape of a knife blade. It fell against her skin, her body and part of her face. She was so different from Derryn, our relationship so different, and yet for a moment they were both the same: the person I shared my life with – but not the things I’d seen, or the things I’d done.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, taking her hand. I shifted back into the darkness, where she couldn’t see my bruises. The less she saw of them, the longer we went without having to discuss my work, and why I did what I did.

  ‘What was the dream about?’

  ‘Just a …’ I stopped myself and looked at her again. How do I tell you everything I’ve done? I brought her into me and we sat there in silence, and then, after a while, I felt her breath on my neck, her face turned to me, still waiting for an answer. ‘I dreamed about some of my cases,’ I said finally. ‘About the men I’ve hunted.’

  She looked at me, eyes narrowing slightly, as if she was searching for the lie. I’d told them to her before, out of nothing more than a need to protect her from the truth – from discovering a man she knew nothing about – and she’d seen right through them. But I must have been convincing enough this time because she dropped her head back against my chest and squeezed me. I felt my heart swell up with guilt, but let it go. She couldn’t know what I’d really dreamed of, because if I told her the truth, she’d realize I’d deceived her. She’d defended me as a solicitor, and supported me as her partner, but I’d only ever told her enough to get me off. She didn’t know every detail about the killers I’d tracked.

  And nothing of the bodies I’d put in the ground.

  The people in the hallway had been those killers, and they’d been those bodies, waiting in line to enter the bedroom. The hiding spot I’d used in the dream had been the same spot I’d used once, back at the start, when one of them had come to my home in the middle of the night to kill me. I understood why I’d returned to that hiding place in the dream and I understood why those men – the ones now in prison, and the ones who were nothing more than bones and earth – had come to me. They were my memories. The men who’d tried to walk me to my grave. The men who’d attacked me, shot at me and tortured me.

  And right at the back, behind the devils and executioners, had been someone else. A deep unease had slithered through my stomach as I watched him – an ominous feeling, spreading fast like an oil spill – and even though I told myself it was a dream, felt the unreality of it, I couldn’t pull myself out. It was like I was drowning. I just gasped for air, desperately trying to reach for the surface, and became frightened in a way I hadn’t been for a long time. And all the time, the man just stood there, looking into the room at me.

  Hood up. No face.

  Just darkness.

  PART FOUR

  52

  When I woke the next morning, the sun was gone. Through the gap in the curtains, all I could see was swollen grey cloud and rain spitting against the windows, breaking into lines and running the length of the glass. I returned to Pell’s place in Highgate, found a parking space just up from the entrance, and sat there and waited. It was harder to be inconspicuous on a Sunday: even though it was raining, the clouds a granite grey, the gutters swirling with dead leaves and water, people passed the car frequently, on walks, with dogs on leashes, heading to the park or down the road to the Tube station. I tried my best to make it look like I was busy: I opened and closed the glovebox when people walked past, polished the dashboard with an old rag, got out to open the boot and look through it. But eventually, as lunch came and went and Pell still hadn’t returned, I gave up and just sat there. The house remained the same as it had been the day before: fewer shadows because there was no sun, but its windows no less dark.

  At just gone two, hungry and impatient, I scooped my phone up off the passenger seat and dialled Gloucester Road to see if Pell had turned up for work today. It seemed unlikely. The house had the lifeless feel of a building that had gone days without being occupied. When I finally got through, the lady I spoke to said he’d called in sick for the second day running, and before she could ask me anything in return I hung up. Pell wasn’t ill; at least not in the way they believed he was. If he was strong enough to put his boot through my face, he was strong enough to make it into work. The question wasn’t whether he was lying about being sick.

  It was why.

  An hour later, I glanced in my rear-view mirror and noticed something.

  I’d walked past it without even taking it in the day before, but now a memory flared, like a brief spark of light. Two cars behind me, on the other side of the road, a vehicle sat awkwardly between a Range Rover and a black Lexus. It was an old Toyota; an early 1990s Corolla, its blue paint damaged and chipped down the doors. But it wasn’t just that the car looked out of place.

  It was that I’d seen it before.

  Three nights earlier, outside Wellis’s home, I’d watched Eric Gaishe walk up to the corner of his street and wait for someone. Someone driving a blue Toyota.

  This blue Toyota.

  It had come down the road to Gaishe, he had leaned in through the passenger window and then – after the car left again – Gaishe had suddenly been holding money. A business transaction. At the time I hadn’t thought about it, but now it seemed obvious. You can’t call up an escort agency and ask for a thirteen-year-old, Wellis had said to me. There’s not a number for that in the Yellow Pages. So I run a service for people. And the night I’d seen the Toyota, he’d been running that service.

  And Duncan Pell had been the punter.

  Wellis knew both of them, Pell and Sam, but it wasn’t a coincidence. I could see that now. When Wellis had been telling me about using Sam to legitimize his business, he’d said, Someone I knew told me about him. This guy said Wren was in finance.

  Who was the guy? I’d asked him.

  Just a guy who I do some business with.

  Pell. He went out for a drink with Sam after the fight at the Tube station. And some time after that – maybe right at the start when he was being vetted by Wellis, and maybe only in passing – Pell must have mentioned that he’d met this guy who was in finance. I looked back at his house, and something disquieting took flight inside me: Leon Spane was dead and dumped on Hampstead Heath, his holdall and coat in Pell’s home; then there was the pouch full of knives, coated in blood; and finally, there was Pell’s taste for underage prostitutes.

  The task force thought Sam Wren had killed Marc Erion. They had evidence that was difficult to dispute, a killer every profiler in the land would tell you was gay, and victims who were homosexual. Sam looked good for this.

  But Duncan Pell had a link to Wellis’s prostitutes too.

  And if I had doubts about Sam, I didn’t have doubts about Pell.

  Not a single one.

  53

  The inside of Pell’s house was cooler than the day before. Outside, the temperature had dropped to the mid teens and the rain had brought some relief from the heat. Inside, the stuffy, enclosed smell had been replaced by the stench of damp; deep in the walls, in the floor, in the ceiling. I made my way upstairs, into his bedroom, and went through his cup
boards again. I’d been pretty thorough the first time, but I checked everything again anyway: every shelf, every drawer, under the bed, on top of the wardrobes. I moved across the hall to the second bedroom and did the same. The holdall was still in there, returned – along with the contents – to the way I’d first found it. Magic Trees swung gently as I searched the wardrobe, pushing clothes aside and sliding out shoeboxes. Jewellery was in one of them: some chains, a couple of rings, and the two stars of an army lieutenant, loose among the rest of the clutter. In the others were receipts and old bills. I’d been through it all already.

  I stacked them back inside and then closed the wardrobe door. It rocked slightly, the legs unsteady, and on top – on the other side of the ornate, carved front panel – I heard something shift. I reached over, feeling around. I’d done the same the day before and not found anything, but now my fingers brushed the hard edges of another shoebox. I teased it towards me until I could get a proper grip, then brought it down and flipped it open.

  Inside were a stack of blank DVDs, numbered one through to ten.

  I headed downstairs into the living room, opened the disc tray on the DVD player and pulled the TV towards me. It was sitting on an old-fashioned stool, in the same dark wood as the wardrobe upstairs. I dropped the first disc in, closed the tray and hit Play. The television kicked into life.

  A black screen.

  And then a picture: video footage of the inside of a flat. I didn’t recognize it. It looked small and pokey, half lit, a couple of worn red sofas and a kitchen behind that, most of it in shadow. Two other doors, one left, one right. In the right-hand one, the light was on and I could see the edge of a bed and a dresser with a mirror on it. In the left one the light was off.

  The camera moved around constantly, as if the operator was getting comfortable, but then, after a while, something clicked and the picture was still. Now it was on a tripod. From behind the camera came Duncan Pell. He was naked. He walked across the flat and stood in the centre, facing the room with the light on. He didn’t say anything; just watched the bedroom, his right hand opening and closing beside him. On his middle finger was the silver ring with the rune on it, the one I’d seen him wearing at the station. As his fingers moved, it caught the light rhythmically, like a bulb switching off and on.