Vanished dr-3

by Tim Weaver

  He looked at her. ‘I appreciate that, ma’am.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then tell me where we’re going today.’

  He studied her. They were headed to Highgate. That had been where Raker had said Duncan Pell lived. Except he couldn’t tell her about Raker, couldn’t tell her about knowing Pell, until he figured out how much she knew and whether she had the photos.

  ‘I don’t know, ma’am,’ he said finally.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He looked at her. ‘One hundred per cent.’

  She nodded and then turned away from him, looking out into the rain as it drifted across the windscreen. ‘Early yesterday morning a man reported seeing something suspicious up in Highgate, close to Fell Wood. It’s an old railway line.’

  ‘Suspicious?’

  ‘Said he thought someone was trying to break into a house there.’

  ‘Whose house?’

  ‘It belongs to a Duncan Pell.’ She glanced at him but he didn’t react. ‘Ever heard of him?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  She eyed him for a second and there was a fleeting hint of disappointment in her face. Then she moved on. ‘Couple of uniforms go and have a look and they find the front door open. No one’s inside, but they call it in. Anyway, the investigating team enter Pell into the system and find he’s already in there, along with our friend Samuel Wren. Both of them seem to have been involved in the same altercation at Gloucester Road Tube station in October 2010. So there’s a link, however small. Both were originally arrested, but neither of them were charged. There was no indication they knew each other, but something’s up with Pell.’

  They found the knives. They found Spane’s jacket.

  ‘He’s got a set of knives in there with blood all over them. Bartholomew barks some orders and we get them rushed through forensics last night, and when you walked in on us I was reading out the results. The DNA from the blood on the knives matches up with DNA taken from the flats of every single Snatcher victim. Wilky. Erion. Symons. Drake. All four of them. Their DNA is all over the knives. And you know what else?’

  Healy looked at her. No. But I can guess.

  ‘Leon Spane’s blood was on the blades too.’ She glanced at him. ‘We all knew he was one of the Snatcher’s victims the minute Wren used his name for the message he left on Drake’s mobile. But you saw it before that. Way before that. You believed Spane was a victim, even when everyone else doubted.’ She nodded once: an acknowledgement she should have listened to Healy. ‘Pell even had Spane’s jacket and his holdall.’

  ‘Who made the anonymous call about the break-in?’

  ‘Didn’t leave a name.’

  ‘Where did he call from?’

  ‘A payphone on Muswell Hill.’

  Which meant it was basically untraceable unless Craw signed off on CCTV footage being requisitioned from the street. Even then, there were no guarantees it would get them a face. First Wellis, now Pell. It was Wren. Had to be. He’s trying to close down anyone who he had any sort of contact with as the Snatcher because he’s knows we’re on to him. He’s trying to insulate himself. This is the end game.

  ‘So what about Wren?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Was his DNA on the knives?’

  ‘His prints were on the knife grips.’

  ‘Shit. So Wren looks good for this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘You were at his house this morning, right?’

  He nodded. ‘Right. Yes, I was.’

  ‘So what did you find out?’

  He couldn’t think of a single thing to say. There are no lies left to tell. He glanced at her. ‘I didn’t manage to find out anything new.’

  But even to his ears it was weak.

  She shrugged. ‘Then I guess we head to Pell’s house.’

  The conversation died away and they sat in silence for a while as the traffic eased, Healy inching the car forward, rain getting heavier and spitting up off the road as mist.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed,’ Craw said finally.

  ‘Disappointed, ma’am?’

  She shifted in her seat, all the way around, and just stared at him. He looked ahead, not turning himself, trying to act normally even as a slow wave of dread washed through his system. Then eventually, as the silence became unbearable, he turned and looked at her.

  ‘You were right about Spane. You have good instincts, Healy. I knew it, right from the off. That’s why I tried to get you involved. But the trouble is, you don’t know how to curb them, you don’t know how to control your instincts.’ She paused; seemed to deflate. ‘Davidson handed me some photos this morning of you and David Raker. I don’t know what you were doing with him, and frankly I don’t care. What I care about is that you looked me in the eye when I sat there and handed you a second chance, and you told me – you promised me – you wouldn’t make me look like an arsehole. You promised me.’

  ‘Ma’am, I can explain.’

  ‘It’s too late for explanations, Healy,’ she said, steely but quiet. She was angry but mostly she was defeated and, in a way, that was worse. ‘No one wanted you here, you do get that, don’t you? Not one single person. Even cops who you go back years with, they can’t afford to get too close to you, because you drag people down. This …’ She waved a hand, her voice gradually starting to rise. ‘This agenda you’ve got. This is the one time you had to suck it up, you had to swallow your pride and you had to keep your head down. But you couldn’t even do that.’

  ‘I didn’t feel I could –’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more,’ she said, and turned away from him, looking out through the windscreen. ‘When we get back to the station, you’re going to walk into my office and you’re going to hand in your resignation. You’re going to tell me you can’t handle the pressure any more, or you feel it’s time to go, or whatever the hell excuse you want to make up. You’re good at lying, Healy, so I’m sure you can come up with something inventive.’ She paused, glancing at him. ‘I like you, Colm. I’ve always liked you. But I can’t trust you. And if I can’t trust you to protect your own career, I can’t trust you to protect mine. So now it’s time to fall on your sword. And once you’ve done that, you walk away from the police and you never come back again.’

  67

  Once I was back home, I returned to the footage. The last time Sam Wren was visible to anyone was the partial glimpse of his legs inside the carriage at Victoria. So that meant he definitely went as far as St James’s Park. Once the train entered the station I hit Pause and spent forty minutes going over the footage, rewinding it, tabbing it on, rewinding it, tabbing it on. By the end of it, as the train left St James’s Park and headed off towards Westminster, I was pretty confident he hadn’t disembarked. I’d been pretty confident all the other times I’d looked, but this time I felt a real certainty, a belief I couldn’t explain. I wondered whether writing out Sam’s life, every moment I’d discovered or had explained to me, had cemented my view of him. I accepted all the evidence against him, because it was compelling and real and difficult to dispute. But when I looked at Sam Wren I didn’t see a killer.

  And I’d never seen one.

  At Westminster, I paused the footage as the carriage doors opened. Everything I already knew about that day, everything I’d replayed over and over again in the footage, appeared on screen again. Two exits, one marked for those who’d landed at Westminster to take part in the protests; the other marked for those who worked close by, or were here to see the sights. The platform was already jammed, people everywhere, some bunched into pockets, some a little more spread out, but once commuters and protesters piled out of the train, it became a mass of bodies, some barely even identifiable as men or women.

  About five seconds after the carriage doors parted, the fight broke out, further up the platform. As it did, the crowd seemed to ge
t sucked towards it, like a black hole drawing them in, and a small amount of space was created at the near end of the station, closest to the camera and furthest away from where the confrontation was taking place. By that time, the Tube staff had already made their move, six of them descending on the fight and breaking it up almost immediately, two more coming in from positions off camera, at the bottom of the frame. One of them, a ginger-haired man I’d spotted on the other run-throughs of the video, was gesturing for people to continue moving towards the exits. The second was a stocky woman, stood at the doors on the end carriage, urging people out of the train – particularly anyone in a red protest T-shirt – before feeding them into the traffic flow created by her male colleague.

  A red protest T-shirt.

  Something flared, the vaguest tail of a memory, and as I fished for it, my eyes settled on the inside of the second carriage. The one Sam Wren had been in. I scanned from left to right, to every person I’d already seen. The woman with her headphones on, oblivious to what was happening. The guy in the suit, sitting down, head in a book but momentarily distracted by the fight on the platform.

  And then the second man.

  The one in the red T-shirt.

  The same memory flared again, unrefined and cloudy. Was there something about him I hadn’t noticed before? He was bending down to pick up a protest sign, and positioned in a space behind a throng of demonstrators looking to disembark. I couldn’t see his face properly through the glass, had never at any stage got a clear view of his features inside the carriage – I’d just always known he wasn’t Sam. He was too big, too tall, had a different physicality, even different coloured hair. There was nothing remarkable about him, nothing unique or unusual to make him stand out. He was just a protester. He picked up his sign, he moved to the doors, he left the train. I knew his movements, just like I knew everyone else’s by now.

  But I didn’t know his face.

  I moved the footage on a couple of frames, and for the first time concentrated solely on him. What he was doing. Where he was headed. And as he leaned over to get the sign, I noticed a fractional movement close to his body, so slight it was virtually invisible. I had to rewind the footage just to make sure I’d seen it: he already had the sign under his arm. I could see the very edge of it – a triangle of white plastic – slowly slide out from under his elbow while the rest of the sign remained obscured at ground level.

  Which meant he’d never been picking up the sign.

  He’d been picking up something else.

  Next was the moment where he actually did bring up the sign. As the video rolled on, it played out exactly the same way it always had: he straightened, stepped towards the doors, turning his back to the glass, and then there was a brief pause. Except now I saw something else I’d never been looking for before: a weird shift to his right, like a jolt. Like he was pulling on something. Seconds later, he turned around again, facing the glass, but the sign was fully up in front of him.

  As if in a deliberate move to disguise himself.

  Before long, he was back in shot: he was standing behind the protesters at the door, the lower half of his body visible, the red protest T-shirt over a pale blue fleece. But it wasn’t an official protest T-shirt. As I’d noted the very first time I’d watched the footage, it had red and white checks on the sleeves.

  Checks.

  I paused the video.

  Is it the checks?

  I wanted to get a clear view of his face, but all I could see were his legs, part of an arm, and his hand holding the sign. There were other protesters either side of him, trying to squeeze their way out of the train, everyone jostling for space. But, even in among them all, even though I couldn’t see his face, something about the man was suddenly familiar to me.

  Do I know you?

  I tabbed forward, quicker this time, punching at the cursor with my fingers as the footage rolled on. Moments later, he was finally at the doors and the crowds in front of him were fanning out onto the platform. Except for one person.

  One person stayed close to him.

  Which was when everything changed.

  68

  The man at the doors of the train paused and then joined the other groups being funnelled towards the platform exit. I hadn’t been looking for him. I’d been looking for Sam. I’d been looking for Sam on his own. I’d been looking for him in a suit, or in a protest T-shirt that had been pulled over a suit, or – at the very least – over a shirt and tie. If he’d removed his coat and jacket in order to put on the T-shirt, it made sense that he would have been carrying them, or they would have been inside his briefcase.

  But Sam wasn’t carrying a coat or jacket.

  He wasn’t even holding a briefcase.

  And he wasn’t leaving the train on his own.

  The man with the sign had his arm around Sam Wren’s waist, though if you weren’t specifically looking, you could barely even tell. I’d never noticed before. It looked like the two of them had just been pushed together by the crowds. Sam was in an official red protest T-shirt, pulled over his work shirt, but he had nothing else with him. I’d always figured the briefcase had gone with him, because if he’d left it behind, it would have been shipped off to lost property and ultimately traced back to him. But it had never surfaced. So either it had contained nothing that could lead back to Sam – or any kind of link to him had been taken out of the case before it was left in the train.

  He looked woozy, unsteady on his feet, but the man was keeping him close. This was the perfect morning to drug someone: there were so many people, so many protesters dressed the same, that no one batted an eyelid. Sam still seemed capable of walking, still seemed capable of being manipulated, but he had no fight in him, no way of preventing what was happening. That was enough to make him pass unnoticed. And the man knew exactly where the CCTV cameras were in order to save drawing attention to the two of them. There were only the checked sleeves of his red shirt, and the sign. No clear view of his face. He made sure the same was true of Sam too: inside a second of hitting the platform, he raised the protest sign above their heads, shifting it across so nothing of Sam’s upper half was visible any more.

  Inside eight seconds, they were both gone.

  I rewound the footage.

  Something squirmed through my stomach as I watched it all unfold again. This was the drug he must have used on Wilky, on Erion, on Symons and on Drake. This was how he was able to walk them out of their front doors. I couldn’t see him drug Sam – maybe because he’d done it between stations – and, in fact, couldn’t see Sam inside the carriage at any point once it arrived at Westminster. But when the man was bending down, presumably dealing with the briefcase, Sam’s clothes and Sam himself – that had to have been moments after Sam had been jabbed with a syringe. From there, the man had been incredibly adept: he kept Sam on the floor, out of sight of any cameras – and the moment he turned his back and jolted to the right was the moment he yanked Sam to his feet again. Unseen by CCTV. Unseen by me.

  I imagined what came next: if anyone had paid any sort of attention – and most people hadn’t because most people were disembarking protesters, half watching a fight at the other end of the platform – he’d claim Sam had fainted. He’d have taken his jacket off, pretending that he was trying to get him some air. Then, as the drug kicked in, he would have made Sam put the T-shirt on, helped it on to him, knowing he was pliant. Putting a protest T-shirt on him, even as he lay there semi-conscious, would have looked odd, but it wouldn’t have looked odd enough. People might have wondered what the man was doing – why he was putting the T-shirt on now, of all times – but once he was off and out of sight of the carriage, most of them would barely even recall it as a footnote. This was London, after all. A city where a body had once lain dead for five days in plain sight before anyone paid it any attention. A city where a jewellery shop’s windows were smashed in by an armed gang and people just wandered past. He didn’t have to worry about people remembering. He just ha
d to get Sam off the train without being seen by the cameras. And but for a second – maybe even less – as they stepped out on to the platform, he’d managed it. I knew the footage better than anyone, had watched it more times than anyone, but it had taken me countless viewings – endless repetition, rewinding and inching through, frame by frame – before I’d seen him walk Sam out.

  The Snatcher.

  It had to be him.

  But why take Sam? Why deviate from the plan? I let the questions go for the time being, moving the slider back to the moment they stepped off the train. And in the second they were both visible – Sam, drugged, looking down at the floor, the man next to him turning away and trying to protect his identity – I finally saw the face of a killer. I saw the man who had taken Sam Wren. I saw the man who had taken Steven Wilky from a flat half a mile from Paddington; Marc Erion from an apartment in King’s Cross; Joseph Symons from his home north of Farringdon station; and Jonathan Drake from his flat in Hammersmith.

  All homes close to the Tube stations.

  All stops on the Circle line.

  He was using it as his hunting ground, watching the men, following them, getting to know their routines and then moving in for them. He knew the Underground stations.

  Because he worked them.

  I’d looked right at him so many times in the footage as he’d moved around inside the carriage, his face a blur behind the glass. I’d watched so many times as he’d stepped out onto the platform, the sign shielding him and his victim from the cameras – and not once had I put it together.

  But I knew why I had today.

  His clothes were different from the uniform he should have been wearing on a Friday morning, and maybe he’d thought that was what would make him blend in. But, ultimately, it was the change of clothes that had given him away. Because now I saw why this time, of all times, I’d been drawn to him: a red T-shirt with checked sleeves. The same top I’d seen in his gym bag earlier in the day.

  The Snatcher knew the Circle line because he worked it.