I Am Missing: David Raker Missing Persons #8

by Tim Weaver

  Except, once I park up and check in at the only B&B around, there seems to be a total lack of playfulness among the people who inhabit this place. Perhaps it’s the perpetual feeling that things are on the verge of breaking down here. The small and compact centre is a good example of this. It’s very easy to navigate, really just a square with some shops, a pub, a community hall and a school around it. But everything feels dilapidated. Paint is peeling. The awnings on shopfronts are faded and discoloured. The school looks more like a prison than a place of education. Even the lido, further out, an odd and – in its own way – beautiful building, a sort of cross between a castle and a spaceship, has gone the same way. It’s still open but its walls are cracked and there are weeds everywhere.

  Ultimately, there seems to be only one reason to visit, and that’s for the hiking. But that’s where things get weird again. Routes aren’t marked on local maps, and there’s a strange lack of cooperation from locals when you ask for advice on where the best trails are located. Basically, I have to work it all out for myself as I make my way up to Steep Fell, a road that runs along the northern edge of the town. Here, I find a set of steps that takes me up to a scree path, which in turn splits into three.

  Two of the routes coil around the eastern flanks of Mount Strathyde as it rises eleven hundred metres, and they end up in almost the same place, at a lookout with breathtaking views across the Wallace Strait. The other route is less challenging but also less rewarding. It heads west, in a shallow diagonal along a straightforward path, until it reaches a kind of plateau. After that, the path disappears and I find myself in a mix of thick grassland and peat bogs, and on the wrong side of a six-foot-high security fence. If the locals show a lack of cooperation in helping me plan a hike on the way up, on the way down they’re pretty effusive about the reasons the security fence has been erected: the marshland is dangerous and incredibly easy to get lost in, and with no local mountain rescue force, it’s safer if everyone just steers clear.

  But not everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. Afterwards, most people tell me the area is shut off because it’s full of explosives left over from when – to protect against German invasion – the coast was landmined during the Second World War. But the man mowing the grass banks of the empty lido says it’s to do with an outbreak of brucellosis in the sheep and someone else tells me it’s due to a rockfall. When I talk to the lady running my B&B, she says she isn’t sure what the reasons are and then hurries out of the room to make me a fried breakfast I never asked for.

  It sums up the weirdness of this town perfectly.

  In a lot of ways, it’s like a living museum, a place that exists on the periphery of Britain, in a bubble of time forty years old. The Union Jacks, the red telephone boxes, the scones, pots of tea on the village green, it’s like riding a wormhole back to the 1950s. The fact that there’s not much in the way of ethnic diversity might, if you don’t happen to be white, make you think that the way the townsfolk respond to you is down to skin colour. It’s not. White, black, Asian, mixed race, it doesn’t really matter that much: locals will talk to you if you talk to them, but you get the impression they’re watching their words. In fact, if you were to let your imagination run away with you, you might start to think that they’re all hiding something.

  They’re all hiding something.

  I first wrote that sentence, in shorthand, on the day I arrived in town, as a joke; the idea that the folk here are harbouring some dark and terrible secret was meant to have been a light-hearted comment. But, the thing is, by the time you leave, you’re not so sure any more.

  Because it actually feels like they might be.

  19

  The Armbury estate was a compact series of three-storey flats about half a mile east of Abbey Wood station. It was shaped like an insect on its side, eight cul-de-sacs, each two hundred yards long, sprouting north out of a long horizontal road called Skylark Avenue. Once I arrived, I could see the name didn’t really fit the place: the approach from the station was bleak and depressing.

  On the train journey across London, I’d spent the time familiarizing myself with the case file in the unsolved murder of the woman. Richard Kite had come with me, sitting on the opposite side of a near-empty end carriage, reading his copy of This Perfect Day. I’d shown him one of the pictures that Ewan Tasker had sent me, taken at the scene: a wide-angled shot of the railway line and the pile of sleepers in which the body had been found.

  ‘Do you recognize this place?’ I’d asked him.

  He’d laid the book down on his lap and taken my phone from me. As I’d waited, I’d gone through some of the other photographs Tasker had sent over that I wouldn’t be showing him. If I’d held any doubts that the victim might not be the woman in the Regent’s Park photograph, they’d soon been dispelled. In situ crime scene pictures were more ambiguous, but a shot from the autopsy was definitely her.

  ‘No,’ he’d said finally, shaking his head. ‘Where is that place?’

  ‘I’ll show you when we get there.’

  Once we did, I went back to the casework and saw that the body had been found on the railway line, level with the three-quarter mark of Skylark Avenue. An old chain-link fence was all that separated the road from the tracks, although the line was in a dip – about twenty feet below the level of the housing estate – and the bank that led to it ran away sharply and was littered with debris. When I stopped and looked through, trying to trace an easy path down, I saw that someone had dumped a TV in the grass immediately in front of me. Beyond that were tyres, a bookcase, mulched cardboard. I caught sight of something else too, blue, still knotted around the trunk of a tree on the far side of the tracks.

  Police tape.

  Richard had shadowed me all the way along the road, saying nothing, his book in one hand, his new mobile phone in the other. He looked nervous. As I grabbed hold of the fence, lacing my fingers through it, I pointed down the slope. ‘This is the place in the photograph that I showed you on the train,’ I said.

  He stepped up to the fence and looked through.

  ‘It definitely doesn’t ring any bells?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ He looked more frustrated this time, his eyes sweeping across the bank as it slid away towards the railway tracks. ‘I don’t remember any of it.’

  ‘You might not have ever been here.’

  He realized I was trying to help – reassuring him that it didn’t matter – but it mattered to him because it was another blank; another question mark he couldn’t find an answer to. His eyes lingered on the items that were dumped in the grass.

  ‘Something was found down there,’ I said.

  I tried to work out what I lost by telling him the truth. I’d brought him here based on our conversation at lunch, hoping for that one second of clarity – that moment of connection – when his deep-rooted instinct kicked in. Telling him about the woman’s murder didn’t concern me: what concerned me was the relationship he’d built – or thought he’d built – with Naomi Russum. I needed all of this kept away from her for as long as possible, and I worried that Richard would unwittingly let it slip, even if I asked him not to talk to Russum about it.

  ‘When do you next see Naomi?’ I asked.

  He frowned, not understanding the change of direction, and – not for the first time – I saw an intelligence behind his eyes; a smart man trying to work out where this was heading as he felt his way through the disorder of memory loss.

  ‘Next week,’ he said. ‘Friday.’

  So either I had eight days where I couldn’t tell him anything, or I had eight days to wrap this case up. If I wrapped it up, it wouldn’t matter what he told Russum.

  ‘A body was found down there,’ I said.

  His face blanched. ‘A body?’

  ‘A woman. I’m trying to figure out who she is.’ I stopped, looked at him. ‘I think there’s a chance you might have known her before you lost your memory.’

  He looked even more unsettled now, his eyes movin
g beyond the fence to the pile of sleepers in which she’d been found, and then down to the phone he held in his left hand. This wasn’t the phone that had been tapped, but he was making the same connections I had: his phone had been compromised; now a woman he may have known was dead.

  ‘Who was she?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know her name.’

  ‘So how would I have known her?’

  ‘I don’t know that either. But she had the same tattoo as you.’

  ‘What?’

  He seemed almost punch-drunk now.

  I glanced behind me at the bank of flats, searching for signs we were being watched. When I turned back to him, he looked like he’d lost even more colour.

  ‘Do you want to come with me?’ I asked him.

  He swallowed, eyes on the sleepers again.

  ‘You can stay here if you want.’

  But he was already shaking his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I’ll come.’

  20

  We landed on the other side.

  As quickly as possible, I weaved a path down the bank between bits of old furniture and appliances, black dustbin bags that had split and showered their contents across the grass. The whole place stank of rotten food and the long grass was slick with rainwater, the mud slimy underneath. The closer we got to the line, the less light there seemed to be: the drop was twenty feet, but it was like abseiling into a cave.

  At the bottom, I looked back at Richard and saw that he was ten feet behind me, his left hand gripping his book. While I waited, I removed a torch I’d brought with me and shone it in the direction of the railway sleepers. Shadows danced across the space in between, junk embedded in the line like old teeth. Mostly, though, it was just grass and weeds, braided around the tracks.

  I was facing east: to my right was a high breezeblock wall; much further down, visible in the deteriorating light, was an enclosed railway footbridge. It ran between two platforms, and its entrances – the stairs up and back down the other side – were boarded up. The bridge was covered in graffiti, a vivid wall of colour so vast it was hard to see any of the original wood panels underneath. When I checked behind me, I saw that the line carried on for about sixty yards in the other direction before hitting a tunnel. The tunnel had been bricked up. It meant this whole stretch of line had been completely severed from the network.

  As my eyes adjusted further it became slightly easier to see, but I kept the torch on all the same.

  ‘You okay?’ I said to Richard.

  He moved in beside me and told me he was, then his eyes began shifting up and down the line, taking it in just as I had. I watched him, his reaction to everything, looking for some spark of recognition.

  ‘I don’t remember this place at all,’ he said.

  I let him have a moment more and then started to move, hearing him fall in behind me. Grass and weeds moved around my knees and ankles, and a couple of times I lost track of where the railway lines were and stumbled as my boots skimmed against them. A skeletal tree sat against the breezeblock wall, an arm breaking out of the earth. The police tape I’d seen from the top was wrapped around its trunk, but where it had been tied at the other end it had come loose, and now it lay across the tracks and grass, coiled like a worm.

  I stopped at the railway sleepers.

  There were eighteen, maybe twenty of them, stacked in a vague rectangle, each one about ten feet long and probably fifty kilos apiece. Originally they must have been part of the track that ran through here, but now they were just dormant chunks of lumber that wouldn’t be going anywhere without a crane.

  As I stood there, the torn police tape whipping against my legs, I went to my phone, bringing up the casework I’d been looking at on the train. Alan Havenger had told police that it was the smell that had drawn him in – ‘this terrible, terrible smell’ – and that, when he’d got to the sleepers, he’d been able to see ‘something white’.

  HAVENGER: I thought it was a piece of broken plate or china or something. There’s tons of that sort of stuff down there. Some of the kids toss things like that over to see how far it’ll go. But the closer I got, the worse the smell became. And then I got down on to my knees and looked through a gap in the side of the pile, and that was when I saw her.

  I backed up and went to the crime scene photos. Even on a small screen, with some of the finer detail dialled down, it was pretty hard to stomach. A pale half-face had been visible. An eye, glazed and misty. Strands of dirty blonde hair, matted to her cheek.

  Other photographs showed the pile of sleepers from different angles, but although hints of her body were evident in milky slivers – the knotty bump of an elbow through the torn fabric of her blouse; the flaky remains of blue nail varnish at the ends of her fingers – most of the woman remained hidden from view. That was the point: whoever killed her had forced her inside a gap in the sleepers, thinking she would never get found. Because of that, she’d been bent double, one knee touching her face, the bones in her arms and legs and neck all broken as she was folded and manipulated into the tiny space.

  ‘How did she end up here?’

  I looked at Richard. I’d been thinking the same thing: how did the killer get her down the bank? It would have been almost impossible to get her over the fence and all the way down here – at least, if the killer was alone – and, even if that was the case, the whole thing would have been an insane risk given how many windows looked out at the fence.

  ‘Do you think she was carried down the bank?’

  I shook my head. ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Too hard and too much risk.’

  He nodded, as if that made sense.

  ‘She was brought in somewhere else,’ I said.

  He nodded again, and his eyes followed mine in the direction of the footbridge.

  ‘Do you want me to go and look?’

  He was standing about six feet from me, a V-shaped fan of grass between us, the hood up on his anorak now. The top of his book poked out of one of his pockets, the pages darkening as they were dampened by the rain.

  ‘I can use the torch on my phone.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Give me a shout if you find anything.’

  He started moving off in the direction of the footbridge. I watched him for a while, his head down, a cone of dusty light in the grass ahead of him – and then I returned my attention to the sleepers.

  Swiping through the rest of the crime scene photography, I paused for a second time on the autopsy picture of the woman’s face. She’d been cleaned up, her hair swept back from her forehead. There were cuts everywhere, small ones dotting her chin and cheeks, where the rough edges of the sleepers had snipped at the skin. There was bruising too – not so much on her face, but all around her neck like a scarf. In the pathologist’s notes, he referred to breaks in, or severe damage to, the epiglottis, thyroid and cricoid cartilage, as well as the trachea, all of which were at the front of the neck. It seemed to confirm the force with which the body was manoeuvred into the space. The pathologist suggested the injuries the woman had suffered in those areas were almost certainly down to the way her head was bent forward, the way it was pressed with such ferocity to her throat. She’d suffered more injuries at the back too – vertebrae had snapped, so had the ligaments in her jaw. As I read the clinical description of her suffering, all I could cling on to was the hope that she’d been dead before she ever arrived here.

  ‘David!’

  Richard was trying to get my attention.

  ‘I’ve found something,’ he said.

  I headed towards the footbridge.

  The closer I got, the worse the weather became. It was fifteen minutes until the sun went down, the light was almost gone, and in the torch’s glow the rain looked like thick lines of silver thread. For the first time, I realized something else too: the footbridge wasn’t actually the shape I thought it was. I thought it had simply connected one platform to the other, and allowed passengers to cross
from the westbound to the eastbound track. But on the eastbound side, the right as I looked at it, I realized now that it was split at the top, and that a second enclosed walkway continued into a housing estate on the other side of the breezeblock wall. I hadn’t been able to see it until now because one walkway was obscured behind the other.

  ‘Here,’ Richard said.

  He was standing at the top of the slope on the eastbound platform. Rain drifted off the roof of the footbridge, down the walls of graffiti, across the track and the platform, dotting my face, my jacket, my hands. I could smell old wood and oil, rotten food, urine, rust. But it hardly registered with me: I was too busy looking at the footbridge, at Richard on his haunches in front of the boarding that was supposed to have prevented anyone accessing the stairs.

  Someone had cut a hole in it.

  I instinctively looked up and down the line, as if answers might be hidden somewhere out there, buried in the shadows. When I turned back to the boarding, dropping to my knees next to Richard, I saw that a square about three feet high and roughly the same wide had been removed. I went to the casework on my phone and did a keyword search for footbridge. Buried in the middle of the investigation was something I’d missed: a one-line confirmation that the police believed this was how the body had arrived at the scene.

  We returned to the sleepers, darkness settling like a blanket now. Moving left, around to the far side, I found thicker weeds and taller grass, everything more dense, the torchlight glinting off the undergrowth and the oil-stained wood.

  And something else.

  It was inside the sleepers, hidden deep within the shadows.

  As I approached, I shone my torch into the interior. The sleepers had been shifted slightly to allow investigators to retrieve the body, but it was still untidy here like everywhere else, overrun, nature growing unchecked.