I Am Missing: David Raker Missing Persons #8

by Tim Weaver

‘She’s not a singer, Richard. She was a teacher.’

  I said it softly, trying to lessen the blow, but another pillar in his life had just collapsed. He looked from the photo of Penny on the edge of the Thames to me, then to Howson, and then back to the photo, and in that second he put it together: if she wasn’t a singer, then Naomi Russum had lied to him; and if Russum had lied to him about that, what else had she lied about?

  I offered him the chair I’d been using. For a second, it was like he didn’t hear me, and it took all I had not to look away, his expression so lucid, so full of betrayal, it was an almost childlike mix of rejection and grief.

  ‘Penny and him knew each other?’ Howson said.

  I watched Richard, his eyes still on the photograph of Penny.

  ‘Penny and him were both from Sophia?’

  This time I turned to Howson and said, ‘There is no Sophia. I think you have to accept that Penny lied to you about where she came from.’ I watched his face dissolve, and he and Richard took on a similar look: conned, misled. ‘But, wherever it is she’s from, I think it’s the same place that Richard came from. If I can find this town, I can find out who Richard is.’

  The two men glanced at each other.

  There were no physical similarities between them – Richard was stockier and better-looking; Howson was plain, taller, skinnier – but they were still two sides of the same coin: Richard had no memory of who he was, of relationships he’d had, of where he came from; Howson remembered everything, but had come to realize that what he remembered, what he’d been told by Penny, was a lie.

  ‘Has anyone ever mentioned a town called Sophia to you, Richard?’

  ‘No,’ he said, his expression blank.

  ‘The name Penny Beck doesn’t ring any bells either?’

  ‘No,’ he said again, his voice cracking.

  ‘Penny, the woman in that picture, had a stepsister called Beth.’ I waited for a reaction. ‘Do you recall hearing that name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about the name Alexander Marek?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Caleb?’

  ‘No,’ he said again.

  Howson was starting to get it now: the pain in Richard’s face, the inability to remember anything, the sense of being shackled to nothing. He shuffled forward on the bed and said to Richard, ‘You don’t remember anything at all?’

  Richard tore his gaze away from the picture of Penny Beck. Tears glimmered in his eyes.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’

  Howson was about to ask him something else, but I held up a hand. He looked from Richard to the photograph of Penny and, for the first time, I saw questions in his face, questions I’d thought about myself too. What if this guy had been Penny’s boyfriend before? What if Penny had loved this man first? What if he was the reason she didn’t talk about her past?

  I retraced my steps to the conversation Howson and I were having before Richard arrived. ‘Did Penny show anyone else what she had found out?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘We need more than you’ve got,’ I said. ‘We need more if you want to pin her murder on Marek.’

  At the mention of murder, Richard looked up from the picture.

  As a silence hung in the air, Howson went back to the sleeve and picked something out. It was the item I’d spotted earlier that looked like a credit card, the one I remembered glimpsing as Howson had left his home.

  Except it wasn’t a credit card at all.

  There were no numbers on it, no bank name, no logos or security chip. But on the back, I could see a magnetic strip and a tiny blood-red symbol.

  A red tree.

  ‘Is that a keycard?’

  Howson looked at the card and then back to me. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it yours?’

  ‘No. I think Penny must have stolen it. I found it hidden at home.’

  ‘Stolen it? Are you saying it’s for the security suite?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you used it?’

  The answer surfaced in his face: he hadn’t. He was too scared, too worried about Marek catching him in the act.

  ‘I think Penny got into that room and went looking for answers,’ Howson said, his eyes flashing in the half-light. ‘She got in there, and she stole all of this’ – he held up the paperwork – ‘and, sometime after that, Marek found out.’

  ‘And that was when he came after her.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think that was when he killed her.’

  I glanced at Richard and saw that he was already staring at me, his face pale, his eyes coloured by fear. He didn’t understand everything that Howson and I were talking about, but he understood enough. He already knew that his phone had been tapped. He’d been to the place where a woman’s body had been dumped. Now it looked like the woman was from the same town as him. Maybe they’d known each other, been friends, perhaps even more than that.

  More than ever, Richard was the key to everything.

  That meant I needed to get him somewhere safe.

  29

  We waited until the early hours of the morning and then left the hotel, heading north along Waterloo Road in the direction of the station. The city had quietened, the pavements slick with the rain that had fallen in the hours before.

  Both Richard and Howson were silent, their heads bowed. At the hotel, we’d spent another hour talking, trying to jog some distant recollection in Richard’s head, a glimpse of Penny, or of the secrets she’d unravelled, but I ended the discussion when I started seeing the effect on him: with every question that didn’t find an answer, he spiralled a little further down. After that, I told them both to rest and, once Howson had fallen asleep on the bed and Richard in the armchair, I went through everything Penny had collated.

  I didn’t find anything new.

  Now, as we made our way north, Howson was clutching the plastic sleeve to his chest, but I had the keycard for the security suite. When we’d left the hotel he’d offered it to me – a tacit acknowledgement that he would never find the courage to use it himself – his voice meagre, his eyes pitched somewhere between guilt and fear.

  I understood the conflict playing out in him. He’d never told the police that the woman on the railway line was Penny, even though he knew it was; he’d never shown the world what he’d found hidden at home, the printouts he’d discovered, the hints and clues that Penny had left behind in books and in drawers. He’d never told anyone about the pattern she’d uncovered – one that, ultimately, probably got her killed.

  Because of that, the guilt was like a disease eating him up from the inside, and the fear he carried only made it worse: if he told the police what he knew, if he showed his hand, he’d have to admit he’d spent two years concealing his knowledge of Penny’s death, and in turn defy the warning from whoever had left the message for him in his notebook. But doing nothing meant the killer got away with their crime.

  Tell, don’t tell: it was torture for him.

  I didn’t doubt that he saw me as a conduit, a way to act on the things he’d not had the guts to do himself, but it didn’t have the air of a calculated move. He was too much of a mess for that, too emotional, his perspective too skewed by the fallout from Penny’s murder. He’d headed to the hotel because he’d panicked, because it was an escape plan, but he didn’t seem to have much of an idea of what he was going to do once he got there. What arrangements did he have in place for the days that were to come? If I’d never turned up, what then?

  When I’d asked him in the hotel room, he’d just shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he’d admitted quietly. ‘I thought about it a lot when I first found that message.’

  Go to the police and you’re dead.

  ‘But not after that?’

  ‘No. I thought the hotel would be a good place to go first if Marek ever came after me, to lie low until I figured out my next move …’ He’d faded out.

  Like so many of the people I found, h
e’d thought a lot about running, about the act itself, but nothing of what came after.

  As Waterloo station came into view, I looked back over my shoulder at the two men trailing me, eyes still down, shoulders slumped, grey under the pale rinse of the street lights. All the remorse and the guilt had drained the colour from Howson; all the frustration and distress had done the same to Richard. The two of them looked like spectres. Directionless. Lonely.

  Adrift.

  We came to a stop in the shadows of an escalator in the eastern corner of Waterloo. The first train left at 5.30 a.m. and headed to the south coast, and I told them to get on it and find somewhere to lie low for a few days. Given what Howson had told me, it seemed highly likely that Marek had figured out by now that I’d made a connection between Richard Kite and the school. That meant Richard was in more immediate danger than before, because of the threat Marek posed, and because of the things he himself had found out since I’d taken the case.

  ‘I know people in Folkestone,’ Howson said.

  ‘Perfect,’ I replied. ‘Head there.’

  It was five o’clock on a Saturday morning, so around us the building was like a tomb: both floors, the platforms, the ticket barriers, the stores and restaurants and entrances were all totally empty.

  ‘Call work on Monday and tell them you’re sick,’ I said to them both. ‘I’ll give you a shout when I think it’s safe to come up for air.’

  ‘I know you didn’t have to help me,’ Howson responded.

  I looked at him. It was his guilt talking: not I know you didn’t have to help me, but I know I don’t deserve it. I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond.

  Instead I asked, ‘Why did Penny do what she did?’

  A frown. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, why go down this rabbit hole at all? Why go looking into Marek? The stuff you have in that sleeve tells us that she found out he was shifting money around and using the school to do it, but why would she care about that? Why put herself in such danger? She stole a keycard from under his nose and went hunting around in that security suite, in his computer. Why?’

  ‘Because she wanted answers.’

  ‘Yeah, but why?’

  He shrugged. ‘She was a good person.’

  That wasn’t it. Changing her name, lying about where she came from, the self-awareness to hide what she’d found and the risk she’d taken in getting inside that security suite – I couldn’t accept that it was all some moral crusade, some noble effort to expose what Marek was doing. In my experience, people prepared to go to those kinds of lengths, for a cause they had no attachment to, didn’t exist outside of comic books.

  This wasn’t the act of some righter of society’s wrongs – if it was, where was the evidence she’d done it before? Nothing I’d heard about Penny, nothing Howson had told me, suggested this was some regular sideline for her. So the question became exactly the same as before: why? Why wade in so deep?

  Did it all come back to ‘Caleb’, the name she’d written on the top of the printouts? Were the risks she took all down to him?

  I didn’t know.

  But now I might have a way of finding out.

  30

  River Hill was quiet. It was early and it was the weekend, so there were no lights on in the office buildings, and no one was coming off Southwark Bridge, or heading south across the Thames in the other direction. All I had to worry about were the people getting ready to open the deli at the top of the road, and anyone living in the only residential building further along.

  Or anyone already inside the school.

  I studied the side entrance, watching from the shadows of a doorway about twenty feet down. Before he’d got on the train, Howson had told me that the side entrance was open between 5 a.m. and 10 p.m. seven days a week, and was how boarders accessed the building and, ultimately, their dormitories on the second floor. I was about to find out for sure.

  At a twenty-four-hour supermarket near Waterloo, I’d bought myself a beanie. The sun was still a couple of hours away, and the temperature was just above zero, so pulling up the collar on my coat and wearing the hat as low as it could go over my face wouldn’t seem odd through the eye of the CCTV camera above the door.

  The camera had been positioned to give a clear view of the entrance, so there wasn’t much I could do to avoid its gaze. The only thing I could do was obscure my approach. I took out my mobile phone and started to pretend to use it, dropping my head. At worst, if anyone was even watching inside, the right half of my face would be partially visible. Once I was outside the door, I kept my head low and worked fast: I ran the card through the reader, praying it wouldn’t ask me for a code, and – when it didn’t – I heard a series of short beeps.

  Nothing else happened.

  The beeps stopped. I paused for a moment, keeping my head turned away from the camera, trying to act as casually as possible. Gripping the card tighter, I went to run it through the reader a second time – but as my hand got to the machine, the door bumped away from the frame and slowly inched inwards.

  I didn’t move as a series of warnings went off like pops in my head. What if the beeping was an alarm? What if it was the noise of the card being rejected? What if there was some way for them to see that the card was stolen? What if someone had buzzed me in and was now lying in wait? Even as the door swung back into the corridor beyond, my feet remained fused to the flagstone steps. But then I took the next step up, into the building, carried inside by everything Howson had told me about Penny’s death, all I knew about Alexander Marek and Naomi Russum – and the lies that had been told to Richard Kite.

  Now out of view of the camera, I stopped.

  The corridor was warm and smelled pleasant, the faint hum of a heating system audible. This time, when I swiped the card through the machine on the second door, it buzzed loudly and clicked out from its frame. I tentatively pushed at it and found myself in the middle of another corridor, this one longer. There were doors at either end as well as one facing me.

  The door to my left had another reader, a Red Tree logo engraved on it, and was marked DORMITORIES. The one to my right had a traditional lock and was labelled OFFICE. The one in front of me, in the middle, had a reader and a sign saying SECURITY.

  Immediately, I went for the middle door, swiping the card again. Nothing happened. I repeated the action and got the same response. I ran the card a third time and waited for a buzz, a series of beeps, any indication that I’d managed to gain access to the suite. Instead, there was no response at all. Did that mean the card was duff? Or did it mean the reader had been reset?

  I made for the door into the dormitories and, when I got there, glanced over my shoulder to make sure that no one had slipped in behind me, unseen. I swiped the card through.

  Nothing.

  My pulse started to quicken. Why would the card work on the outside but not the inside doors? Had I walked into a trap?

  I retreated quickly along the corridor, to the door that led back to the street. No one else was entering the building. Everything looked the same as before. There had been no change, but it did nothing to suppress my alarm.

  Briefly, I thought about getting out, about all the reasons not to stay here, but then something familiar took hold of me: the weight of responsibility I felt to the people I helped; the lifeline they’d given me in those first years after I buried Derryn; the obligation I had to the people like Penny Beck who’d fallen along the way. It was like a carcass strapped to my back. It was a burden I couldn’t ignore.

  So I kept going.

  Pocketing the keycard, I made an immediate beeline for the third door, the door marked OFFICE; the one with no reader, just a regular lock. I tried the handle.

  It was open.

  As the door inched inwards, I caught sight of my face in the brass of the plaque, the C and E of OFFICE reflecting back my expression. I looked tired, which I was. I looked disquieted and anxious, because I was both of those too. I could see beads of sweat
along my hairline and two, maybe three days’ beard growth in a dark strip of shadow from ear to chin to ear.

  Once the door had followed its arc into the room, I could see an oak desk with legs as thick as tree trunks, and a series of shelves, each set behind frosted-glass panels that had individual locks on them. To my left were two sofas facing each other, a coffee table in between, and then another set of shelves, also locked up. It was hard to tell for sure, but behind the frosted glass it looked like ring binders were stacked side by side. Sitting on the desk was a MacBook and an in-tray, and behind both of those was a window, looking out to an Italian-style garden, bordered by high walls and lit up by a line of pale lamps.

  I pushed the door shut and then made my way around to the laptop. A leather chair had been rolled in under the desk, but I didn’t bother sitting, just booted up the MacBook and listened to it hum into life. As I waited, I tried to shift open the shelf panel closest to me, to see if the locks on the glass were being used or just for show. The panels shifted slightly on their runners, but they didn’t slide across.

  I didn’t worry about the panels for now, or the ring binders inside, and instead focused my attention on the laptop. A couple of seconds later, an icon – the logo for the Red Tree – appeared. Below that was a password prompt and a tiny photograph of the laptop’s owner: Alexander Marek.

  But then my attention switched.

  Outside the door, I could hear footsteps.

  31

  I shut the MacBook down and headed for the office door, pressing my ear to it. My blood had started running cold in my veins and, out of nowhere, I’d begun remembering something a doctor had said to me once, in the aftermath of a panic attack I’d suffered: This job of yours might cost you your life. And maybe it won’t be because you get stabbed. Maybe it’ll be because you’re sick. He’d meant biologically sick. He’d meant cut down by disease or infection, by my body turning against itself, erasing me from existence cell by cell. But maybe my sickness wasn’t that at all.

  Maybe my sickness was obsession.