I Am Missing: David Raker Missing Persons #8

by Tim Weaver

  Four thirty.

  It was an hour and a half until sunset and probably another thirty minutes after that until it was dark. I finished the rest of my tea and then put my coat on.

  Richard looked up at me.

  ‘Do you fancy a drive?’ I asked him.

  ‘Uh, okay. Where?’

  ‘I’d like you to show me where you woke up.’

  7

  We cut up through the New Forest and then hit traffic on the motorway, looping around Southampton in a slow arc. Richard talked on the way about work, and sport, and shows he’d seen on TV over the past nine months. I quickly realized that those things had become important to him, not because he was genuinely passionate about them, although he may have been, but because they’d become a way into discussions that ordinary people had. So much of his life was a blank, so many of his cultural references had gone the same way too, so talking about sporting events that had taken place over the last nine months, films and TV shows he’d watched, even politics he’d seen on the news, no longer made him the Lost Man. He was a part of the conversation again, not the subject of it.

  Seventy-five minutes later, we arrived at Coldwell Point, a long rectangle of paved parking spaces, hemmed in by the River Hamble to the right and Southampton Water to the front. The RNLI station lay on a spit of land at the very edge of the river mouth as it fed into the estuary, and had a slipway at the front.

  From the car park, the mouth of the Hamble was hardly visible. Mostly all I could see was the vast sweep of Southampton Water, opening out in a gradual V shape as it moved from the city all the way down to the Solent. On its far bank, about a mile and a quarter across from where we were, there was a pancake-flat expanse of land that housed the chimneys and turrets of factories, and the hulking carcasses of container boats. The rain had finally gone and the skies had cleared, so even the mediocre view looked better with some light on it, the sun bleeding red across the clouds that still remained. But if I’d been hoping to find something – some steer on how and why Richard Kite woke up on the edge of the water here – I already knew that the trip was going to end in disappointment.

  We got out of the car.

  I watched him for a moment, standing next to the door of the vehicle, his eyes on a spot about twenty feet away. His gaze travelled from there to the end of the peninsula, where the RNLI station was, and then out to the opposite end, where a camper van had parked up. A couple were out at the front, taking pictures of the estuary and boiling water on a portable stove.

  I pushed my door shut and came around to the front of the car. Richard was still breathing the place in, his eyes back on the spot that he’d zeroed in on at the start. I figured this was where he’d woken up nine months ago. The car park, and everything up to the station, was fenced in, although it was easy enough to get beyond the barrier and out into the water: the fence was more for show than safety. On the other side, I could see that the peninsula was surrounded by a frill of shingle, like a pale outline.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s where they found me.’

  He was pointing to the place he’d been looking at, about halfway between us and the RNLI station. I started moving across the tarmac and, gingerly at first, he followed. Around us, the light was changing quickly, the sun a disc melting into the horizon. When I got to the fence, I looked down, the sea glinting in the embers of evening. There was nothing to mark out the particular patch of land that he’d been found on – it was the same mix of shingle, stones and sand that existed everywhere else along this unremarkable finger of land.

  There were no lights on inside the RNLI station either and no cars parked in the spaces outside. I thought about whether it was worth me staying in the area, so I could speak to the men who’d found Richard, whether it might be worth doing the same with Reverend Parsons, who’d been away for the day as well. But I figured I’d take a look at the report that Parsons had put together first and, if I needed to return to the area, I’d just have to come back again.

  I tried to see if I’d missed anything – any kinks in the car park’s layout, things that looked out of place, anything that might give me an idea of how Richard had ended up here – but there was nothing. As he’d already told me, there was no working CCTV camera here at the time of his discovery. So where might the next nearest camera be located? A mile back on the main road? Across the other side of the estuary from where we were? Again, those answers could have been in the report that Parsons had compiled, but even if there were other cameras, they’d clearly been of no use in answering questions about how Richard Kite came to be discovered out here.

  I turned and looked back at him.

  He was standing right in front of the fence, his knees almost touching it, looking down at the shingle. Beyond him, vessels carved out trails on the water – huge tankers slowly making their way south, speedboats, yachts – their wakes interconnected, the chop and rhythm of the sea eventually washing all the way back to us. When he finally looked up, the sun was gone and the sky had started to bruise, and it seemed to perfectly reflect the expression in his face.

  This place held no answers for him now, just as it had held no answers for him when he’d woken up on the edge of the water, bloodied and forgotten.

  8

  I got home just before 9 p.m. The house was quiet, something that had become familiar in the years since my wife had died, but it felt cold and abandoned as well, and that was harder to adjust to. I could put the fire on in the living room, put the lights on everywhere else, and they’d brighten the house and warm it up, but I knew neither of those things would alter the way it felt.

  I showered and changed and then called Annabel.

  Although she was twenty-eight, we’d only known each other for four years. All that came before that was a lie, first told to me, then told to her. We were making up for lost time, but – with her on the edges of Dartmoor – it was hard living so far apart. Once or twice we’d talked about her moving to London to join me, or me moving back to Devon – where I’d grown up – to be closer to her. But things were complicated, with my work, with the fact that Annabel had a twelve-year-old sister, Olivia, for whom Annabel was the most important thing in the world, and the idea always drifted. We were both adults and we were rooted to lives we knew long before we knew one another.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, after picking up.

  ‘Hey, sweetheart. How are you?’

  ‘Pretty good,’ she replied, although it didn’t sound convincing. ‘I mean, Liv’s being a nightmare – but then you knew that already.’

  ‘What’s up with her now?’

  ‘The usual crap. She’s twelve. You tell her one thing, she does the total opposite. I’d have more luck trying to reason with a tree.’

  Biologically, Annabel and Olivia weren’t sisters, but they’d been brought up thinking they were. Olivia’s mum and dad – and the couple who Annabel had always believed were her parents – were gone now, and Annabel had a fractious relationship with her real mother, so in these moments I knew I should offer to help, but never really knew how to. It felt awkward offering advice to Annabel. I had no experience in bringing up a twelve-year-old girl. I had no experience of raising a child at all.

  Despite that, I did what I could to act as a sounding board, and then Annabel started chatting about her work as a dance and drama teacher, and asked me about my day, about what case I was working. I told her about Richard Kite.

  ‘I think I vaguely remember him,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, he was on the front page of the Herald back in January. That’s where I recognized him from. I must have been down with you that week because his case wasn’t really covered much beyond the south coast.’

  ‘So he can’t remember anything?’

  ‘Some small things, but nothing useful.’

  ‘Not even his name?’

  ‘His name, his age, family, friends – nothing.’

  ‘Shit,’ she said softly. ‘Poor bloke.’

  ‘Ye
ah,’ was all I could think to say in response.

  ‘How do you even end up with something like that?’

  ‘Deep trauma, an accident, abuse, the impact of a war or some disaster. The thing is, the memories aren’t gone, they’re buried. Some might come back by themselves, or they might not. That’s why he’s in therapy, why he’s been put under hypnosis as well: they’re trying to draw his memories out.’

  ‘But it hasn’t worked.’

  ‘Not yet, no.’

  ‘Imagine not even being able to remember your own name or your family,’ Annabel said, and then we both fell silent for our own reasons. I looked up at the walls of my living room, at the photographs of my daughter, of Olivia, and of my wife, Derryn, whose pictures I’d gradually got out again over the past six months. I’d unwrapped and hung them after my last relationship had collapsed, and in returning to these same, small biographies of a life, I found some comfort.

  Derryn was a woman I’d connected with better than anyone I’d ever met, who I understood and who understood me – all my faults, all the ways in which she could make me better. I’d trusted her, and I’d loved her, and even eight years after I buried her, sometimes I missed her so much it hurt.

  But at least, however lonely I got, I had her photographs.

  I had my memories of her.

  Richard Kite had nothing.

  9

  I woke early, went for a run, and got back before the sun was up. By the time I’d showered and had breakfast, the forty-page document that Reverend Parsons had put together for Richard Kite was sitting in the printer tray.

  I took it through to the living room and started with the information that DC Barton had provided to Parsons and Richard, trying to see what I had to work with. It wouldn’t be everything Barton had come up with, but – given that the case had already hit a wall, and there was no victim as such, and therefore no traditional parameters for keeping the information, evidence and any potential leads secret – it would be enough for now. If I needed to get hold of the actual case file, I had old newspaper sources who could organize that for me.

  Pretty quickly, it was obvious how difficult Richard’s case was to categorize. It wasn’t a criminal investigation, because there was no testimony to confirm that a crime had taken place. Barton talked to Parsons about where Richard had been found and about how he had been found – his clothes, the shoe that was missing – and then spent a while detailing all the cuts and bruises on the left side of his face. He also included an overview of the forensic investigation, which stated that the bruising around Richard’s left eye, and his cheek and chin on that same side, disguised subcutaneous lacerations – or tissue tears beneath the skin – consistent with blunt force trauma. That suggested Richard was the victim of an attack, but because he couldn’t remember anything, and because there was no definitive way of confirming what weapon may have been used, it was hard for forensics to reach a definitive verdict.

  I carried on reading. In testing, forensics had found faint traces of calcium hypochlorite on Richard’s hands. That was the main ingredient in swimming-pool chlorine tablets. It was also used in granular form to disinfect drinking water. Richard had described himself as a strong swimmer, but what was likely to be more relevant – if Barton’s theory was correct – was that it was used in polishes and waxes, in solvents, in oils and hydraulic fluids. Those were substances and solutions, if Richard had been some sort of mechanic or tradesman, that could easily show up on his hands. The same test had looked for other chemicals, and combinations of chemicals, with a view to narrowing down where the calcium hypochlorite had come from – a particular type of oil, for example – but the results were inconclusive. Forensics blamed the introduction of seawater. Richard could have been lying at Coldwell Point for hours and, depending on tidal patterns, parts of his body may have been fully submerged at various times. The seawater would then act as a contaminant, skewing or fully obscuring potential results. I made a note of it and moved on.

  Hampshire Police had come to the conclusion that there were really only three possible reasons for Richard to have been found where he was. The first was that he’d gone to Coldwell Point, whatever his motivation for doing so, and been attacked there. The second was that he’d been attacked somewhere else, perhaps knocked unconscious, and driven to Coldwell Point and dumped. The third was that he’d washed up there.

  The first two made most sense, and not just because of his injuries. When I checked notes from his medical – trying to find reasons to support the third – I saw that he’d swallowed no great amount of water, and there was no evidence of damage to his body consistent with a struggle to stay afloat. That either discounted him being carried to the river’s edge by the tide, or it meant he’d swum. The idea of him doing that wasn’t impossible, again because Richard had referred to himself as a proficient swimmer, but Southampton Water was over a mile wide at the place he was found, so it would have made for a hell of a swim. There were other, related questions too. If he’d been on a boat, why had he gone overboard? Was he being taken somewhere against his will? Had it been an escape attempt? If it was, why hadn’t his abductors come after him as soon as he hit the estuary? On the assumption that he’d gone overboard, and that hadn’t been the plan, I struggled to see why someone would abduct him and then just let him go. And even if they hadn’t realized he was gone until much later, why didn’t they return for him at some point? It seemed much more likely that Richard was the victim of an attack.

  Two other, smaller things stuck with me.

  One was a tattoo that Richard had. I referred back to his personal information – height, weight, eye colour, hair colour, basically areas of his life that weren’t intangible or impossible to prove – and found a more detailed reference to it under DISTINGUISHING MARKS. It was on his upper left arm, about an inch from the shoulder blade, five centimetres high by four centimetres wide. There was an over-saturated picture of it, on his arm, in the report. I leaned in closer, lightly tracing the outline of the design with my finger.

  It was the silhouette of a bird in flight.

  Was it just a coincidence that he had this tattoo and that ‘kite’ was also a type of bird? No one had picked up on it in the report, and Richard himself had said nothing to me about the tattoo or his reasons for getting it, so I just made a note of it and moved on again.

  The other thing I noticed was that, in all the reports, he was referred to as Richard, rather than Mr Kite, Richard Kite, or just Kite, because this was before he’d ever come up with a surname for himself. It seemed to add to the sense that this was a man lost in the system, isolated and detached. I’d never given a lot of thought as to how important a surname was, but it seemed obvious now: it was a way to normalize yourself, to fit into a structure. People fought against structure all the time, about the idea of being a cog in a machine and a name on a database. But it was easier to fight the system when you were already part of it, when you’d been assigned an identity and a number, when your wallet was full of ATM cards, and people didn’t look at you sideways if you told them that you couldn’t remember what your name was, or that you knew how to drive but weren’t allowed to, or that you couldn’t open a bank account like everyone else.

  A surname was nothing until it was everything – and economically, bureaucratically and socially, it was everything to Richard Kite.

  10

  After failing to speak to her the day before, I tried Richard Kite’s psychologist again. This time I got through to Naomi Russum’s secretary. She told me her boss had back-to-back appointments and would struggle to find time for me today, but then I told her I was looking into the case of Richard Kite, got put on hold, transferred, and put on hold again – and finally Russum herself picked up.

  ‘Mr Raker?’

  Her voice was soft, well spoken. I’d found a photograph of her online and had been through her website. She was in her mid forties, slim, had brown eyes, olive skin, and dark hair styled into a bob. Her practice
was called the Aldgate Clinic and was at the western end of Aldgate High Street, and Russum employed three people – one other psychologist, and two consultant psychiatrists. In her bio, it said she was a research fellow at King’s College London and worked and taught in both the NHS and the private sector.

  ‘Thanks for taking my call, Dr Russum.’

  ‘You’re phoning about Richard?’

  I told her that he had come to me, asking for my help. ‘I suppose what he’s asking me to do is recover his identity,’ I said, and then paused, seeing how that sat with her. She didn’t reply. ‘I want to assure you, I’m not here to step on your toes. I’m just hoping there might be a way we can help each other.’

  ‘I’m not sure I see how.’

  She wasn’t being obtuse – at least, it didn’t come across that way – but she was making it clear she didn’t believe there was any common ground between us. She was approaching Richard’s life from a clinical standpoint; my approach was emotional, intuitional. There was method to my work, but not the kind of method she applied to her sessions. I sensed she was heading off any request I might have been thinking about making in terms of sharing information as well. I hadn’t expected her to reveal her conclusions, data she’d gathered, the content of her time with Richard, but she was making absolutely sure I knew that, just in case.

  ‘Would it be possible to meet in person?’ I asked.

  ‘What would be the point of that?’

  ‘It might be useful.’

  ‘For whom?’

  I didn’t respond, and there was a long pause.

  ‘Okay,’ she sighed, ‘although I doubt it’ll be of any use.’

  ‘I appreciate it.’

  She gave me a time of five o’clock and I hung up before she could change her mind. In truth, I wasn’t even sure what I hoped to get from her, but as one of the people who’d spent the most amount of time with Richard Kite, she was someone I needed to see.