by Tim Weaver
Something hitched in Travis’s voice.
‘According to Bowners,’ he continued quietly, coming forward in his chair, ‘a stretch of the Loop was cut off temporarily when a truck spilled some logs across it.’ Rebekah remembered the night she’d got to the top there, in the middle of the storm, before she’d headed into Helena, and had found wood and plastic fasteners across the road. ‘That meant when Lima was done …’
Done.
Done burying her brother.
‘Once he was done, he couldn’t take the direct route back to Helena, along the southern flank, because it was blocked. He had to go the other way around and come past the lighthouse. That was how Johnny’s wallet ended up there. Apparently, according to Hain, when Lima was driving away from the dig site – after he’d buried Johnny – he spotted the wallet near the top of the trail. Your brother dropped it when he died. Lima didn’t want to leave it out in the open there because he thought it was too close to the body, so he stopped at the lighthouse and dumped it there.’ Travis reached over and took her hand again. ‘I’m sorry, Bek. This is just …’ But there were no words.
His other hand went to the flash drive.
‘With two cops dying at your house,’ he said, ‘with the recovery of, first, Louise’s body, and then the other two women’s, then Johnny’s, and then me, and all the other terrible shit that’s been going on since the island, somehow no one got this over to you. It got missed. I know that Bowners is going to call you to apologize later on. She says they meant to show you days ago.’
‘What is it?’
‘Lima missed something in Johnny’s pockets.’ Travis stopped, looking at Rebekah, and as she wiped her eyes, she nodded, letting him know she was ready to hear. ‘Johnny hid it in the coat’s actual lining.’
‘Hid what?’
‘You remember that day at the forest you got back to find the window on the Cherokee had been smashed? You covered it with plastic wrap for five months.’ Rebekah nodded. ‘You remember how the dashcam got taken from the Cherokee, and it never made sense why someone would steal it?’
Rebekah frowned.
Travis pushed the flash drive all the way over.
‘This’ll explain everything.’
85
A week later, Rebekah left the girls with Noella for the morning and went into the city. She felt scared at first, frenzied; she stood on the front porch of Noella’s house, unable to move, unable to rip her eyes away from the girls. But, her heart beating hard, she dragged herself forward and rode the subway in, and gradually, as the minutes passed, she started to calm down.
In the time she’d been on the island, her medical licence had expired and because she had made no attempt within three months to seek another two-year extension, she’d had to call the Office of Professions to explain what had happened. They’d told her, because her case was unusual, and because they were having a hard time understanding, to come by the office on Broadway.
After she was done filling out forms, she walked a block to Bryant Park, the sun beating down out of a clear blue sky, and found a table in the shade at the back of the Public Library. She’d brought her laptop, as well as the flash drive Frank Travis had given her the week before, and – in the zipped pouch of her laptop bag – something else: the card her mother had sent.
She’d fished it out of the garbage.
She had no real idea why. She still felt as much confusion about and contempt for Fiona Camberwell as she had the day she’d dumped the card in the trash can, but eventually she’d gone back to the kitchen, rifled through the old food, the chip packets, the detritus of her family’s life, and reclaimed it. It was stained and wrinkled, but it had survived.
She opened it again now, looking at the message.
I was sorry to hear the news about John.
‘Excuse me, would I be able to use this chair?’
Rebekah looked up from the card.
A man in his late forties, tall, broad, good-looking with dark hair, was standing next to her. He had a bag over his shoulder and a coffee in his hands.
‘Sure,’ she said.
He smiled at her. ‘Thank you.’
He dragged the chair away from her table and set it up at the next one along. Rebekah’s mind wandered again, back to her mother, to the flash drive, to the idea of going back to work, her thoughts moving fast.
‘Are you okay?’ the man asked.
She realized she was still staring at him. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry. I was miles away.’
The man smiled again. ‘Well, that’s a relief.’ He looked down at himself, his shirt, his pants. ‘I thought I might have food on my face.’
‘Ha, no, you’re okay.’
‘You’d tell me if I had food on my face, right?’
‘It depends how amusing it looked.’
The man smiled a third time. He had a lovely smile.
‘You’re English,’ Rebekah said to him.
‘I am,’ he replied. ‘You sound like you might be too.’
‘Not for a long time. I moved here when I was eighteen.’
‘But you still have some of the accent.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘for some reason, it’s always hung in there. I like it.’ She paused, thinking of Johnny, of how he’d hated his mid-Atlantic accent. The memory made her sad, so she pushed it away. ‘Are you here on vacation?’
‘Sort of,’ the man said. ‘I’m meeting a friend for a couple of days. She lives out in LA, and this seemed like a good halfway point for both of us. What about you?’ He checked the time. ‘Are you having an early lunch?’
‘No, not yet. Maybe soon.’
He didn’t pry, even though he must have been curious.
‘I’ve been on a sort of career break,’ she said.
‘Okay. And you’re thinking about going back?’
‘More through necessity than desire.’
It was only brief, but as they looked at each other it was like something passed between them, an understanding of how onerous necessity could be.
‘What do you do?’ the man asked.
‘I’m a doctor. An orthopaedic surgeon.’
‘Wow, you look way too young to be so qualified.’
She laughed. ‘Not as young as I’d like.’
‘I’m guessing you took a career break to have kids?’
This time, she paused before answering.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That was incredibly nosy.’
‘No, it’s fine. It was a pretty accurate guess, though.’
He nodded. ‘Please don’t be creeped out.’
‘What about you?’ Rebekah asked, studying him.
‘I’m an investigator.’
‘Like a private investigator?’
‘Sort of. I find missing people.’
Rebekah looked from the man to her mother’s card, creased, tarnished, its lack of an address, the lack of a kiss, a sign-off, any clue about who she was.
The missing person who brought me into this world.
She turned her attention back to the man. He was watching her closely now, but not in a way that troubled her or made her feel uncomfortable. It was more like the look Frank Travis had always given her: curious, humane.
She reached out a hand. ‘I’m Rebekah Murphy.’
He took her hand in his.
‘It’s lovely to meet you, Rebekah. I’m David Raker.’
86
The flash drive contained a single video file.
Seven days had passed since Travis had handed it to her, and Rebekah had watched it hundreds of times. She knew every single inch of it, every word, every blur, every accidental tilt and stumble. After a while, viewing it was like watching a flower die and grow simultaneously. Much of it she could barely even look at, yet she did, because the rest, much more of it, she cherished.
That night, after meeting the missing persons’ investigator and trading cellphone numbers, she collapsed into the couch – the sun bleeding out in the
sky, the girls in bed – and opened her laptop. A video window was already up.
As night slowly began to creep into the room, for a long time all she did was stare at the freeze-framed image on the screen, thinking of something her father had said to her in the days and weeks before he died.
Even the dead can talk.
In the end, he’d been right.
She pressed Play.
An image of Johnny started to move. He was mostly out of shot to start with but Rebekah knew exactly where he was: on the track leading up from the parking area at Simmons Gully towards the Loop. He was halfway, breath in front of his face. This was minutes after Rebekah had fallen into the gully.
Minutes after Lima thought he’d killed her.
Johnny was frightened. He didn’t know if he was doing the right thing in leaving Rebekah. He’d gone back, hadn’t been able to find her, thought the next best thing was to try to get help. But now she could see he’d lost confidence.
Now he felt as if he’d abandoned his sister.
Even so, he kept going, running, the video jarring and disorienting. Then he slowed again, seemed to remember he was holding the dashcam, and stopped. Briefly, he started turning it, trying to find something on it. The image was upside down, on the side, facing one way and then another: Travis had told Rebekah that no one had been quite sure what Johnny was trying to do. But she knew. On the drive to Montauk, Johnny had asked about the dashcam, and she’d told him Gareth had installed it, and that he’d said the dashcam had an emergency response feature that sent out an SOS if you were in a car accident. That was what Johnny was looking for in these moments. That was why he’d smashed the window of the Cherokee to get at the dashcam. He’d thought there was a button on it he could press. He’d thought, in lieu of him having his cellphone, it might get them found.
But, very quickly, he stopped looking.
Because that wasn’t how the SOS function worked.
There was no button to press.
He broke into a sprint again, the dashcam still recording the spaces behind him, the ground, a skewed angle on the trees. He was running with it in his left hand. At one point, his legs turned and he was looking behind him, and as his body swivelled, he slowed, and the noise died for a moment.
There was the sound of a car engine in the background.
Lima.
He was coming.
Johnny started running again, faster, the picture a blur of movement. It became almost impossible to see anything clearly – until, out of nowhere, the dashcam came up to Johnny’s face, as if he’d suddenly thought of something. The angle wasn’t perfect: the camera was on the back of the dashcam, so the screen was facing away from him. He had no real idea if he was in shot or not.
‘I don’t know if anyone will ever see this,’ he said, and although Rebekah had heard him say the same words countless times, something twisted inside her as he spoke. ‘Someone’s trying to kill us.’ His voice frayed. He was terrified – of leaving Rebekah, of what might have happened to her, of what was going to happen to him. ‘My sister … I don’t know where my sister is. She might be …’
Dead already.
He faded out, glanced behind him.
For a second, when his face came back to the camera, he was white, the fear so utterly paralysing it seemed to have collapsed him, altered his features somehow. But then he looked behind him again, down the track, the forest on all sides of him – bleak, rigid, wind crackling in the dashcam’s speaker – and it was like he understood that this might be his last chance to say something.
‘Bek,’ he said simply, his eyes watering from the cold, from her name and what it meant to him. Wind ripped through the trees. Johnny looked away again, behind him, and now there was a clear speck at the bottom of the track.
It was Stelzik’s Chevy.
When Johnny turned back, there was terror in his face again – terrible, consuming – and it cleaved Rebekah in two.
He knew he couldn’t outrun a car or a gun.
‘If anyone ever finds this, if my sister’s still alive, tell her that I love her.’ He looked behind him. He was crying properly now. The cold had nothing to do with it: as the Chevy closed on him, tears were running into the corners of his mouth. ‘I never said it enough. Maybe I never said it at all …’
He blinked more tears away.
‘I love you so much, Bek.’
‘I love you too, Johnny,’ Rebekah said quietly.
And, finally, the screen went black.
To start with, Rebekah could find no good in what she’d been through. Nothing positive. Nothing she could use. Mostly, she tried not to think about all that had happened to her, reducing it to a scar in her past.
Yet as time went on, as her memories became greyer, as her pain began to subside just a little, in the cord of that scar, she discovered one profound and undeniable truth.
I know who I am now.
I know what I do.
So, whenever the doubts came back in the months and years that followed, whenever her courage threatened to take flight, she would return to that truth. She would tell herself who she was and what she’d become.
And she would promise herself never to forget.
My name is Rebekah.
And I survive.
Author’s Note
For the purposes of the story, I’ve carefully altered some of the working practices and organisational structure of the NYPD, the Suffolk County Police Department and the American medical system. I’ve also taken some very minor liberties when it comes to dashcams, VHF radios and the layout of both Jeep Cherokees and Dodge Rams. I hope all of these things have been done with enough subtlety and care for them to have passed unnoticed – at least, until now.
Acknowledgements
I absolutely love working on the David Raker series and, as I write these words, have already started the next one. But after finishing No One Home, my tenth Raker novel in ten years, I spoke to my editor and agent and told them that, before I started No.11, I wanted to try something different. Basically, I wanted to work on an idea I’d been kicking around for a while – part-survival story, part-mystery, about a woman being stranded miles from her children, with no way back. I thought it would be a challenge creatively, not least because I’d never written a standalone – and, of course, I hoped, once I was done, it would return me to Raker feeling refreshed and even more excited about making people disappear. (In the books, obviously, not in real life.)
And to their credit, both my editor Maxine Hitchcock and my agent Camilla Bolton didn’t balk … or pretended not to. I owe Max such a huge debt of gratitude for trusting me and backing me, as well as for her brilliant, elegant and incisive editing which improved the book immeasurably. And I owe Camilla so much too: her belief that I could write this novel never wavered once and she helped me clear my head and reset so many times. Agent, friend, guinea pig appreciator – thank you.
Another extra large, capital letters THANK YOU goes to the fantastic team at Michael Joseph and Penguin, who include (but aren’t limited to): Jon Kennedy, Lee Motley, David Ettridge, Jennifer Porter, Katie Williams, Vicky Photiou, Liz Smith, Olivia Thomas, Christina Ellicott, Deidre O’Connell, Rachel Myers, Natasha Lanigan, Louise Blakemore, James Keyte, Laura Marlow, and Hazel Orme. A special extra shout-out to Rebecca Hilsdon for all her work on the edits and Beatrix McIntyre for being so ace dealing with what can only be described as ‘Proofmageddon’.
At Darley Anderson, I’m so indebted to Mary Darby, Kristina Egan and Georgia Fuller in Rights, Sheila David in Film and TV, and Rosanna Bellingham and Jade Kavanagh, who all do such a superb job for me, day in, day out.
For helping maintain my sanity over coffees, pub lunches, texts and Zoom, thank you to my great writing pals Chris Ewan, Claire Douglas and Gilly Macmillan.
Thank you, as always, to my beautiful, brilliant family: Mum and Dad, who I love so much; my sister Lucy, and the Ryder crew, Rich, Hannah and Sam; the Linscotts – Boxie, Di, Delme,
Kim, Declan, Nathan and Josh; and my awesome extended family, including my uncles Barry and John, and #1 aunty, Jo.
To the two people who have signed up for a life sentence by having to live with me: first, my daughter, Erin, who I love more than anything in the world and who makes me so proud every single day; and then my wife Sharlé, who dug me out of so many holes on this book, who unravelled and rebuilt all my terrible timelines, and who patiently spent two weeks (and every evening) on my proofs reassuring me that everything would be fine. I couldn’t have done this without her.
Finally, to you, my wonderful readers. Thank you for buying, borrowing, talking about and recommending my books, for the lovely emails and social media messages, and for taking my novels to your heart. Quite simply, without your support, none of this would be possible.
Four stories. Four cases. One connection.
THE SHADOW
AT THE DOOR
by Tim Weaver
When Paul Conister heads upstairs he doesn’t return. His wife Maggie goes up to find all the windows are locked from the inside and Paul’s phone and wallet are next to their bed. He hasn’t left. And there’s no sign of him anywhere.
This case brings missing persons investigator David Raker into contact with three other mysteries. A deadly discovery by the night patrolmen in an Underground station. A cold case with a witness that no longer exists. A tragic shooting of a young man with a terrible secret.
Four stories. One connection.
Only Raker can uncover the truth.
Coming autumn 2021 – pre-order now
DAVID RAKER RETURNS IN 2022 …
THE
BLACKBIRD
Missing persons investigator David Raker has never had a case like this one …
