I Am Missing: David Raker Missing Persons #8

by Tim Weaver

  ‘She was a liar and a fraud,’ he said, picking at the label on the water bottle, ‘but I wouldn’t have chosen that end for her.’

  His expression endured for a moment, and then he snapped out of it and it was like it had never been there.

  ‘You, though,’ he said, using the neck of the bottle as a pointer, ‘you, I couldn’t give a shit about. I’ll leave this ship in ten minutes and I’ll never spend a second thinking about you. If you’d told me how it was you came to know so much about Penny, the next hour could have gone a lot easier for you. But now it won’t. And Howson? I’ll track him down, and I might have to finally take care of Richard too, depending on what you’ve told him. They’re going to suffer badly, David. And the only person to blame is yourself. I gave you your chance. Remember that.’

  He chucked the water bottle at me.

  It hit the wall just to my right. I watched it all the way, turned as it landed, and as I heard Dell leave the room, I scooped it up off the floor, parched, desperate.

  And then I realized something.

  Marek had moved.

  My brain barely had time to catch up, my system skewed by dehydration, by the sweat in my eyes, by the prickle of fear that had coated my skin like sea salt – and, by then, he was right beside me and it was too late. I suddenly understood why he’d stayed there, in the same spot, with his hands behind his back: he’d been hiding a thin metal truncheon about the length of a forearm.

  ‘You should have talked,’ he said.

  And then he swung it into my ribs.

  48

  Pain flashed through my chest. I rocked back on my chair, and the whole thing went from under me, my entire weight propelled towards the wall. I hit it hard, sliding down it, into the corner of the room.

  I was in shock, dazed, my body on fire.

  By the time I’d gathered myself, I realized Marek was directly over me, his feet planted either side of my legs.

  I managed to get a forearm up to protect my face, but the impact just deflected the pain. It screamed through the joints of my arm – wrist, elbow, into my shoulder – and, when I tried to shuffle away, he cracked the metal rod against my knuckles. I cried out, the sound so ineffective inside the room that it disappeared the moment it left my mouth.

  Another blow to my ribs. One more to my forearm.

  Hands, body, forearm, over and over.

  And then, finally, he got me across the back of the neck and, as the impact sent a ripple through my throat, I hit the floor. This time, I really did black out.

  When I came to, Marek was at the door.

  I watched for a moment, everything sideways with my face planted on the ground, pain throbbing in my hands and arms and ribs. I twisted myself, right and left, trying to see if he’d broken anything, but it just felt like cuts and bruising. The baton was simply a way to soften me up. He was breaking me down, weakening me, so that I couldn’t fight back – because whatever was coming next would be worse.

  Except something had changed.

  Marek pulled the door all the way open.

  At first, he only opened it a sliver, looking through the gap, and as I hauled myself up on to my backside and shuffled against the wall, I wondered if he was talking to someone. But I couldn’t hear any words and, a few seconds later, he glanced back over his shoulder at me, making sure I wasn’t going to make any quick moves, and then looked both ways and stepped out.

  The door remained open.

  I stayed there, uncertain whether this was a trick or not – but Marek didn’t reappear. All I could see was a shadowy rectangle of corridor.

  After thirty seconds, I pushed away from the wall and got to my feet. Still there was nothing. I came around the table, aching, a little unsteady, angling my head so I could see further beyond the door.

  It’s a trap. It’s got to be.

  The corridor was so dimly lit and the interview room so bright that, at first, it was hard to adjust to the contrast. I could hardly even make out the surface of the walls, the grey of the ceiling. But I could feel something: cold air. It purred out of a grille outside and wafted into the interview room. It felt good against my skin, and for a moment I was mesmerized by it: the sheen of sweat on my face, my arms, frozen instantly; the fever of my head and the heat of the bruises cooled. I slowly let my eyes adjust to the corridor.

  Marek was standing about a foot away from the wall, mostly concealed by the shadows. The truncheon was on the floor next to him. I tried to imagine what game he was playing, and what might happen if I stepped beyond the boundaries of the room.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

  He didn’t respond at first. But then a shudder seemed to cut through him, as if he was wired to a socket. He blinked, and said through his teeth, ‘You just messed up big time.’

  I frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

  I looked around the interview room, at the camera and then down at the one bottle of water I’d drunk from, discarded on the floor. You just messed up big time. Did he mean the water? Had they put something in it? I didn’t feel ill. I didn’t feel sick. If it wasn’t the water, what was it?

  Marek had come forward a couple of inches in the meantime, his frame at the edge of the light, where one of the lamps cut a livid glow across him. I looked him up and down, trying to figure out what had changed, but my head was banging so hard now, I was finding it difficult to focus. I could feel it echoing all the way down to my throat, across my shoulders, vibrating in my bruises. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, what this was, what I lost by heading to the door and exiting the room immediately. There had to be a catch.

  But then I noticed something else.

  In the corridor, behind Marek, there was something white. I fixed on it, trying to see it more clearly. It was like a fish breaking the surface of the ocean, there and gone again. When I glanced at him, he just looked back, but there was something in his face, a confirmation.

  You’re not seeing things.

  I took a couple more steps forward, only a foot from the cusp of the room, and stopped again. I could see all the way to the right now, to the office. The security staff were all gone, just as Dell had promised. Off to the left, the door back out to the restaurants was shut.

  But there was something on the floor in front of it.

  I tried to work out what it was, and where it had come from, and then my attention was drawn up. There was a hollow in the ceiling.

  An open air vent.

  The thing on the floor was its cover.

  I looked at the sliver of white in the darkness behind Marek, and then it started to become more than just a sliver: it was the white of a sleeve, the straps of a backpack, and then a hand, and then a gun.

  The gun was pointed at Marek’s head.

  ‘Are you okay?’ a voice said.

  And from behind him a face finally emerged: blonde hair cut short; green eyes flashing in the half-light; dirt smeared across one of the cheeks; bruises in a chain along her arm. Cuts. War wounds. The scars of survival.

  It was Beth.

  49

  She told Marek to go to the office.

  In the shadows of the corridor, he looked almost twice Beth’s size and, for a second, he didn’t move, as if he was testing her, as if he was telling her he could bulldoze her, overpower her, turn the tables instantly. But he didn’t. He started walking instead. I watched him, his eyes flicking to me and then away again, and saw the truncheon he’d been holding discarded on the floor, ten feet from him.

  He could also see what I saw in Beth. She was small, thin and sinewy, no more than five two or five three, but there was something about her: a presence, a fierceness, an air of having already survived much worse than this, physically and emotionally. As she shoved the gun into Marek’s back, both he and I understood why he was doing as she asked: there was no hesitation in her, and neither of us doubted she would fire the gun, not even for a second.

  I stayed where I was as they moved – the tw
o of them passing in and out of the lamps stationed along the corridor’s walls – and then I headed in the opposite direction. As Marek shuffled into the office, as Beth told him to go to the other side of it and sit down, I opened the door and looked out at the restaurants. It was after 1 a.m. now, and they were mostly empty. From where I was, I had a clear view of two of them, one French, one an American-style diner, and I knew there were two more off to the right, out of sight beyond a red and white striped awning on the front of the diner. Some people were still milling around the entrances, near banks of sofas in the atrium, in a series of shops off to the left, but most passengers had left for the night.

  I looked for any sign of the security team close by, but they weren’t here and neither was Dell. It had been ten minutes since he’d left. If he was heading back to the helipad and leaving Marek here to finish things off, he’d probably be about to leave. I doubted if he would expect Marek to fail.

  That gave Beth and me some breathing room.

  I closed the door and watched as Beth ripped phones from their sockets in the office, taking the leads with her, a walkie-talkie too, so Marek couldn’t communicate with anyone. After that, she locked him in. She tossed the key away and it pinged against the floor and landed in the shadows. But she knew the office would only hold him for as long as he remained in our sight. Once we were gone, either the security team would come back, or he’d smash his way through the glass.

  Beth turned to me and put the gun in the band of her trousers. Half submerged in the dusty light of the corridor, I saw her eyes shift quickly: back to the office from which Marek looked out at us, to the hallway in which we stood, to the interview-room door, and then to the air vent she’d used to access the corridor. It was survival instinct kicking in. It was a detailed knowledge of the ship, a mechanical sense of which things were right, which things were out of place, which fitted, which didn’t. When she was done, she came down the corridor towards me, her movements quick and focused.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t eaten for two and a half days, but otherwise …’

  She nodded.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  She nodded again. The white of her right eye was stained red, a splintered patchwork of blood vessels tracking the border of her iris. Her skin was pale, specked in dirt and the tiny prickles of a rash, and while she was plain, in many ways unremarkable, that was exactly how I imagined she’d succeeded: because of her size and the way she looked, she was constantly underestimated – and it was only when you were this close to her, when you saw the look on her face, that you started to get it. She was compact. She was resilient. She was sharp as hell.

  Again, her gaze switched from one end of the corridor to the other. It wasn’t the sort of sense you developed for a place off the back of only a fortnight, or three weeks, even the time that passengers would spend on-board when the ship was at sea for eighty days. She didn’t know this place because she’d spent a few weeks hiding out with Richard Kite back in January.

  She knew it because she’d made it her home.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

  ‘Since December.’

  She replied so matter-of-factly it almost hid the enormity of what she was saying.

  Eleven months.

  The boat had a continual changeover of passengers and crew, so its make-up altered all the time. It made it a perfect hiding place. It was rare that the staff would remain on-board for all eighty days – and, if she was in the uniform she’d stolen, the passengers were unlikely to take much notice of her – so that meant a rolling quota of four thousand people. It was a crowd big enough to hide in. If she was clever, which she clearly was, she could exist without ever being looked at.

  I turned my attention to the gun in her belt. ‘Where did you get that from?’

  ‘I stole it.’

  ‘From security?’

  ‘From their safe.’

  ‘How did you get into their safe?’

  ‘By putting in the code.’

  I thought about her using the vents, about how she might watch people from them, hear things, see things like security codes.

  ‘And me?’ I said.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘How did you even know I was on-board?’

  She shrugged. ‘Because I saw you.’

  I was about to ask her when – but then it came to me. Back in the laundry room on the second day, after I’d found the carrier bag in the vent, one of the housekeeping staff had returned. They’d said, You’re not supposed to be in here. To start with, I thought they’d been speaking to me, but then I’d made my way out and been approached by Larry Grobb, and I’d never stopped to consider it again. I’d never had the chance to. If I had, I’d have realized the woman from housekeeping hadn’t been speaking to me.

  She’d been speaking to Beth.

  ‘You came back to the laundry room,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you saw me in there, with your things.’

  ‘Yes. After that, I followed you. I wanted to see who you were. I watched Grobb approach you, and then I watched them take you down to the interview room, and then I waited for you – except you never came out.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why come and get me like you did?’

  ‘Because I think you can help me.’

  ‘How did you even know you could trust me? Coming here, doing this, it’s such a huge risk for someone you don’t know.’

  ‘I heard them talking about you,’ she said, eyes starting to shift again, back and forth along the corridor, hanging on Marek for a time. ‘After I saw them take you down to security, I got up into the air vents. They called you dangerous. They said you were asking questions about me.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Why? What do you want with me?’

  ‘I’m trying to help someone you may have known.’

  She eyed me but didn’t say anything.

  ‘He thinks his name is Richard,’ I said, ‘but he’s lost his memory and doesn’t know if that’s actually what he’s called.’

  Except, a moment later, I knew that really was his name. She reacted, a breath escaping her lips, as if she’d been holding it in, and there was a flicker of emotion in her eyes – a flash, a crack in the mask.

  ‘Richard,’ she said, almost to herself.

  And that was when I knew something else: she hadn’t just known him.

  She’d loved him.

  50

  We sat across from each other on the floor of the corridor. I was starting to cool now, my body stiffening as the adrenalin died and the bruising began to flower.

  Opposite me, Beth watched Marek, his expression the same as it had been since she’d first locked him in the room: impassive, almost indifferent. At one point, he ran a hand down the back of his head, following the line of his ponytail, but mostly he remained absolutely still, watching us both, obviously trying to understand what we were talking about.

  Beth brought her backpack around in front of her, unzipped it, reached in and removed some water. As I took it, thanking her, she handed me a chocolate bar, a packet of dried fruit, some crisps, a sandwich in a packet, and then looked to her left, her features in profile, as if searching the shadows for something else. I watched her as I ate, the two of us silent, and then when I was almost done with the food and she’d turned back to face me, I said, ‘How did you end up here, Beth?’

  She wiped dirt away from her face, the cuts on her skin like cracks in an old oil painting.

  ‘I don’t know where to start,’ she replied.

  ‘Just start with Richard.’

  She rubbed a finger over her eye; nodded. ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘He’s doing okay.’

  ‘I read online that he has no memory.’

  She said it so softly, so quietly, it was hard for me to hear her above the noise of the air conditioning.

  ‘He only remembers a couple of things. Look
ing out at a beach as a kid, at some sort of coastline – I’m assuming somewhere near Sophia.’ I waited, but I didn’t get the sense that, even having known Richard Kite, she knew where the beach might be. ‘And he remembers the intro sequence to a TV show. I read in a book that it might be called Kids’ Hour.’

  She smiled. ‘Kids’ Hour.’

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘Yes. Everyone in town used to watch it after school. We didn’t have many channels growing up – we didn’t have much of anything, really – so you took what you could get. They used to have this cartoon in the middle of the show, this dragon who was supposed to be huge and fierce but was actually always frightened. My sister and I, we loved that bit – it always made us laugh.’

  ‘Your sister is Penny, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked at me. ‘Did you know her?’

  Her accent was coming through strongly now.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard about her, though.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I spoke to her boyfriend in London.’

  ‘She had a boyfriend?’

  ‘She didn’t tell you that?’

  Beth seemed to shrink. She brought her knees to her chest, looped her arms around them. ‘No,’ she said distantly, eyes fixed on a space between us. ‘She left Sophia when she was sixteen and never came back.’

  ‘You never heard from her after that?’

  ‘My stepmum would sometimes, an email or a phone call. But Fiona died about five years back – she had cancer – and after that I never knew what Penny was up to, because she and I had stopped speaking, and I …’ She came to a halt. ‘I said some things to Pen that I just … I wish …’ She stopped again. ‘I just wish I’d never said them, that’s all. She was my sister. I know we weren’t blood, but in all the ways that mattered she was my sister. And after she disappeared, it was the first time that it ever hit me: I was never going to get … to get the … the …’