I Am Missing: David Raker Missing Persons #8

by Tim Weaver

  Fear.

  Sometime after that, the police declared the Brink officially out of bounds to everyone in town, citing the unexploded bombs. It became a hinterland that existed in the tall grass and steep slopes of the hills beyond their homes, where no one would stray. To the kids, to the adults too, the area beyond the fence became a place of whispers and shadows, a place they didn’t mention to outsiders, a repository for secrets they were too scared or too embarrassed to talk about. The fence was checked over and strengthened, and – halfway along one of the three trails that snaked from the town into the hills – the town council built an eight-foot gate in an effort to stop hikers and tourists – or drunken rubberneckers from the town who had nothing better to do – unwittingly ending up at the Brink.

  But it didn’t stop Penny and Beth.

  Four months after the gate went up, the girls returned to the hill again. They said goodnight to their parents, waited an hour, placed pillows under their duvets, and then climbed down the trellising on the outside of the house.

  Breath gathering in the darkness above them, they headed out through the northern edges of the town – avoiding shops, the pub, the community hall – and picked up the trail. They didn’t switch their torches on until they were out of sight, and when they did, they quickened their pace, tracing the twisting path that would eventually take them to the gate. It was much scarier on the trail after dark, the hills bigger and more frightening, but it was easier to go out at night. They wouldn’t risk running into anyone, and no one would suspect a couple of girls – one of them now twelve, the other ten – of having the guts to go out like this. They weren’t exactly sure what they were going to do when they got to the gate, how they were going to get past it or over it – they’d just work it out once they were there. But that was when they discovered something.

  A gate had never been built.

  The adults were lying.

  14

  I woke early the next morning.

  Padding through to the kitchen, I filled the kettle and looked again at the photos I’d taken of the woman in Richard Kite’s file. I’d studied her face on the journey back the previous night, trying to see if I recognized anything else in the picture, but I’d slowly tired as my adrenalin fizzled out.

  Off the back of a night’s rest, I still struggled to find anything new in the picture and also didn’t understand why Russum would have two copies of the same shot. Even if I was willing to believe that she’d selected the image to see if Richard recognized Regent’s Park, there were a thousand other pictures she could have chosen, all of which would have provided a clearer view. So why was this woman in the file twice? Who was she?

  I couldn’t find any obvious answers.

  Making myself a coffee, I grabbed my laptop and switched my attention to the school I’d followed Russum to instead. I’d never heard of the Red Tree before, but I’d done a cursory search on my mobile the previous evening and found out pretty quickly that it was one of London’s most prestigious private schools. As I went back to their website again, I now saw that, under Fees, it was almost seven grand a term for day pupils and over eleven for boarders. It wasn’t quite Harrow, Malvern or Eton, but it wasn’t far off.

  In History, I discovered that the school was named after a copper beech that had grown in the yard at the front of the building – its leaves a distinctive purple-red – until it was struck by lightning in 1962. I found out that the current building was constructed on the site of a church burned down during the Great Fire of London and, before it became a school, it had been a government office, a home, a museum and a bank. I also came across an Our Staff page, with photographs of the headmaster – a man in his late forties called Roland Dell, handsome and well groomed – as well as his deputies and the various heads of department.

  Again, I started to wonder if any of this really mattered. The only vaguely relevant question was why Naomi Russum had visited the school, and why she had a swipe card for the security door, but even that was beginning to seem more obvious in the cold light of day: the bio on the Aldgate Clinic’s website said that Russum taught in both the NHS and the private sector. This whole thread had come about not from a direct connection to Richard Kite, but because – certain that she’d been keeping something back from me at her office – I’d followed her.

  So why would she record our conversation?

  Unable to come up with anything, I went back to the shot of the woman, sitting on a bench in a sun-dappled Regent’s Park. I studied her face, trying to work out who the woman might be, why Russum might be showing Richard her picture, and why Russum kept two identical photographs of her. I looked at the two pictures individually and then together, and then individually again, and as I did, I found my gaze drifting to the woman’s neck, her collar, her shoulders.

  I stopped.

  Scooping the phone up off the table, I pinch-zoomed into an area at the top of her left arm. Her blouse was opaque on the chest and shoulders, but at the arms it switched from a silky material to a kind of thick gauze. It was still hard to make out the skin beneath, but I could see the outline of something now, under the material of her blouse and poking out, just fractionally, below the hem of the short sleeve. I swiped right, going to the second, identical photograph of the woman.

  They’re not the same.

  I leaned closer to the screen, swiping back and forth between the two photos. In the first, the woman had a small black mark beneath her blouse. But in the second picture, there was no mark. It was gone. The two shots were identical except for a single tiny thing: in one of them, the woman had a tattoo on her arm; in the other, it had been digitally removed.

  The tattoo was a silhouette of a bird in flight.

  It was exactly the same as the one Richard Kite had.

  15

  I called the landline at the church. It was a Thursday morning, which was when Richard helped out there, but the church secretary said he’d called in sick.

  I put the phone down and thought of the conversation he and I had had the previous evening about his phone being tapped. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he was spooked and didn’t want to go into work. I called his mobile this time: once I got hold of him, I’d have him find a landline at the caravan park – or, even better, if he’d already gone out and got himself a replacement phone, we’d just use that.

  But all I got was his voicemail.

  I hung up without leaving a message and tried to think laterally. Maybe he genuinely was sick. Maybe he was asleep. Maybe he’d already headed out to get a new handset and left the old one at home in the caravan. If any of those were true, he’d either return, or wake up and find out he’d missed a call from me.

  Except something else happened instead.

  Forty minutes later, as I stood at the kitchen counter making more coffee, I watched a man appear at the gates of my drive, study the house and its number, and then move gingerly, almost timidly, to the front door.

  I opened it before he’d even rung the bell.

  ‘Richard?’

  He had a rucksack on his back and a brand-new mobile phone clutched in his hands.

  ‘Sorry to surprise you like this,’ he said.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I, uh …’ He swallowed. ‘I’m sorry, I just got a bit …’

  Scared.

  I invited him in, then made him a drink. When I took it through to the living room, he still looked panicked, shorn of his maturity, smaller somehow as he leaned over the table and took in what amounted to his case so far. He pointed to the paperwork as I approached him.

  ‘Have you found out who I am yet?’

  He said it with a smile on his face, but his eyes betrayed him: deep down, a part of him was clinging on to the hope that the answer might be yes.

  ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about the phone,’ he continued softly.

  I looked at the new handset he was holding.

  ‘I got the replacement like you said, but I can’t s
top thinking about the old one.’

  He glanced at the table again. It was an untidy mix of papers and partially hidden photographs and would have meant about as much to him as if there had been nothing on the table at all. His eyes were red, ringed with the evidence of a sleepless night; a night when every noise he heard outside the caravan had sounded like whispers and footsteps. He seemed even more confused, and was probably a little angry too, but mostly he was frightened. I hadn’t really seen it the day I’d met him, but I saw it now – the child in him, the echoes of who he’d once been.

  ‘Why would someone be trying to track me?’ he said. ‘I just don’t get it.’

  ‘Neither do I yet, but I’m going to find out.’

  He nodded.

  ‘I mean it.’

  I went to the table, pushed aside some paperwork and picked up one of two printouts I’d made of the woman in Regent’s Park. This was the photograph with the tattoo removed. I looked at her for a second, at the BT Tower behind her, at her face, at her arm, and then handed it to Richard.

  ‘Do you recognize her?’

  He frowned, taking the printout. In all the years I’d worked missing persons, in all the years I’d been a journalist before that, I never thought there was much subtlety to confusion: you were either confused or you weren’t. But every time I looked at Richard Kite, I realized how wrong I was. He was in a perpetual state of turbulence, disorientated to the point where every new question he had, every answer he didn’t expect or understand, knocked him a little further off course.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and looked up at me. ‘I recognize her.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘She’s one of the women Naomi shows me.’

  ‘Does she show you this woman’s picture often?’

  ‘I don’t know about often. But sometimes.’

  ‘Does she say why?’

  He shrugged. ‘Trying to jog my memory, I guess. She shows me all sorts of pictures of people, landmarks and events. This woman … I think Naomi said she’s some sort of singer.’

  ‘Right. What did she say her name was?’

  ‘She doesn’t really tell me their names. She says it’s better for me long term if I can try and remember them using visual cues.’

  That sounded like bullshit even to a layman like me.

  Richard eyed me. ‘Don’t you know her then?’

  This was where I had to be careful. I needed him to act normally the next time he sat down with Russum – otherwise she’d instantly know something was up – and I was already asking him to keep from her the idea that his phone was being tracked. Making him question the veracity of the things she was showing him would make him question the treatment she was giving him, and that would only lead us into deeper water.

  ‘No,’ I said to him, trying to make light of the situation, ‘but then I’ve always been more of an Elvis man.’

  He smiled, studying the picture again, while I went hunting for musicians on my laptop, using the woman’s physical description as a way to try and narrow the search. I didn’t get very far but I remained pretty convinced that she wasn’t a famous singer.

  Taking the printout back from him, I slid it beneath a stack of other papers and said, ‘Have you ever heard of the Red Tree before?’

  He looked at me. ‘The Red Tree? No.’

  ‘It’s a school. You’ve never come across that name? Maybe it’s somewhere that Naomi might have mentioned in your sessions?’

  ‘No,’ he said again. ‘Never.’

  I moved on.

  ‘I read in the paperwork that you’ve got a tattoo on your arm.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I take a look?’

  He removed his thin anorak and put it on the back of the chair. Underneath, he had on an army-green fleece. He unzipped that too but only took one arm out. Even before he’d turned his shoulder to me, I could see it.

  He took a step closer, holding the sleeve of his T-shirt in place at the top of his arm. The tattoo was simplistic and not particularly detailed – exactly as it had looked in the file I’d read. I’d been hoping I might have been able to tell what bird it was up close.

  ‘Any memory of getting this at all?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘No idea where or when?’

  ‘No, none.’ He looked down at his arm, his red hair falling forward. ‘I wish I could remember,’ he added quietly.

  But when he looked up at me again, there was something else in his face – and whatever it was, I couldn’t read it as clearly this time.

  ‘Are you okay, Richard?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Is there anything else you want to tell me?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It’s just so frustrating,’ he said, and then started readjusting his T-shirt and fleece until the tattoo was covered up again. ‘It’s just so frustrating not being able to remember.’

  I nodded, watching him closely.

  As I did, I felt suspicion start to surface again, forming like a ball at the back of my throat. I just wasn’t sure if it was for what I’d found out about Naomi Russum, about the lies she’d been telling me – or whether, much worse than that, I was genuinely starting to doubt Richard Kite himself.

  16

  I offered Richard the sofa bed in my spare room, left him to sleep off the effects of a night without rest, and tried to get my thinking straight. If he was lying to me, or keeping something back, it wouldn’t be the first time that someone had hired me and sat on a secret. But, equally, I knew there was an easy explanation for his hesitancy and general sense of confusion.

  The truth was, I didn’t see him as a liar, certainly not a vindictive and deliberate one, and so far couldn’t see how he would benefit from having me chase my tail for weeks on end, searching for answers he already had. And because suspicion tended to dismantle a case quickly – especially if it was cast in the wrong direction – for now I chose to believe he wasn’t playing me and returned to the casework.

  The first thing I did was call an old friend of mine, Ewan Tasker, who was a semi-retired ex-detective doing consulting work for the National Crime Agency. I’d known him since my days as a journalist, when I’d used him as a source and, in return, he’d used me to help push stories out into the wild that aided his cause.

  He picked up after a couple of rings.

  ‘Raker, you old dog.’

  ‘Hey, Task,’ I said, smiling. ‘How’s things?’

  We chatted for a while – about his wife, who hadn’t been well; his golf swing; people we knew inside and outside the Met – and then I gently steered the conversation around again and told him I was hoping for a bit of help.

  ‘What are you after?’

  ‘A database search,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to ID someone. A white female in her early to mid thirties. I don’t know anything about her – name, DOB, address, history, anything. She’s basically a blank. To be honest, she may not even be in the database, but if she is, I think it might be a tattoo she has that could narrow the search down. It’s a silhouette of a bird on her upper left arm. You can just about make it out in the photo I’m sending you.’

  Tasker whistled. ‘Okay.’

  ‘I know it’s super vague.’

  ‘So you think she’s in the database because she hasn’t been ID’d yet?’

  He meant, did I think she was dead.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to think about her.’

  As I pondered that, a second thought came to me: if she was in the database, her tattoo would have been entered as a distinguishing mark – so why hadn’t Richard been linked to her already? After all, they had the same mark in exactly the same place. It meant that either DC Barton had done a half-arsed job during his initial investigation – which I doubted – or the woman definitely wasn’t in the database. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that I’d end up with nothing from Tasker�
�s search, but nothing was pretty much what I had on her at the moment, so I wasn’t sacrificing anything by getting him to look.

  ‘All right,’ Tasker said. ‘Leave it with me.’

  ‘Thanks, old man. Could you also run the name Naomi Russum?’

  ‘You got a DOB there?’

  ‘Nineteen seventy-two is as good as it gets,’ I said, looking down at my notes. I’d found the date in a biography at the end of a paper she’d written.

  Task said he would do that as well and rang off.

  I returned to my laptop and went searching for Russum myself. There was plenty to find: she was widely published in academic circles, she’d been frequently featured as an expert on news channels and radio phone-ins, and in an image search I stumbled across a series of pictures of her at social functions, charity events and minor celebrity junkets. The photos were mostly from magazine websites like Hello! and OK!, the sort of high-polish, stage-managed shots that showed people with rigid smiles and champagne glasses in hand. In accompanying captions, Russum was variously referred to as a renowned psychologist, a writer and broadcaster, a successful city businesswoman, and MD of the exclusive Aldgate Clinic. In all the photographs of her, she was immaculately dressed and styled, but the awkward smile and the lack of light in her eyes immediately put me in mind of when I was at her office.