The Vanishing

by John Connor

  What his son was telling him had the flavour of a confession about it. Tom felt guilty about something, though from everything he was saying there was no need for that. But that was another effect of violence. John had all the technical knowledge to understand it, but that wasn’t going to help much. What Tom had been through was something he had never experienced directly.

  Tom recounted a terrifying kidnap attempt – if that’s what it was – on the island. He described the assailants, including two white guys. He told John how Sara Eaton had shot at least two of them, killed them, then how they had fled through tropical forests and escaped in a plane. It sounded like something out of a film.

  From there it moved to Brussels, and finding out that Liz Wellbeck was dead. They had gone to find a family ‘PA’ to get the truth about it, only to find her dying. Tom had chased someone who had fallen and died. So they’d fled from there too. It was a catalogue of disasters and fuck-ups.

  They had got across the Channel on a private yacht, then been betrayed by Alex Renton. As Tom got to the last bit the shaking stopped and his voice became harder. By the time he had finished they had crossed London and were about five minutes from his home. John had asked very few questions to clarify details. There had been no need. But he knew details were missing, pieces that would make it all fit properly. Tom was keeping stuff back.

  He slowed the car in Hounslow, his heart thudding with adrenalin, stunned at what he had been told. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘I’ll stick to what we agreed, but I want you to think about what you’re going to do …’ But Tom was already opening the door. John leaned over and put a hand on his arm, stopping him. He asked the single most glaring question he had. ‘Why you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why did Sara Eaton contact you? What did she want?’

  Tom looked away quickly. ‘I’ve no idea.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry to have dumped all this on you.’ Then he was out and walking off.

  40

  It was like saying a prayer before bed. Every single night since Lauren had been taken Rachel had done it. Sometimes she had been on odd shifts and slept during the day, sometimes in the early years she had fallen asleep at her desk, or on trolleys in Casualty, waiting for the pager to go off – but she had always found time for it. She had kept to it like a ritual every single night, over twenty-two years. She would lie down, close her eyes and imagine what she would do when she first saw Lauren again. Imagine it happening, coming true. Imagine Lauren standing in front of her, returned to her, safe, alive, well.

  At first the images had been traumatic, reducing her to tears, but repetition had slowly turned them into something comforting, a mark of continued hope – a way, even, of keeping that spark alive. As the years had passed her mental picture of Lauren had changed effortlessly to try to match how old she would be. She had never – not even once – had a doubt about her imagined daughter, about how she would look, move or speak. At some stages disorienting, brutal thoughts had tried to get in there, to distort the image, and resisting them had become part of the nightly ritual, like shunning evil, turning her back to Satan. Because she was aware that the Lauren she dreamed up to walk and stand and smile in front of her was a happy Lauren, not a child who had lived through some twisted, perverted hell. She knew that if that had happened to her baby then she had no idea what she might look like now. But she had become practised, over the years, at keeping those thoughts at bay. They had no part in this night-time rite, which was something between only Lauren and her, something no one knew about, something intensely private.

  In recent years the images had been the same ones each night, the same dream. She would be standing somewhere full of people – a place like an airport terminal or a railway station – her eyes searching the crowds of faces for the one she knew. The searching often went on for a very long time. Sometimes in the last couple of years she had even begun to panic, fearing that the face was gone, that it wouldn’t ever reappear. But it always had eventually. Lauren always returned.

  A tall, confident young woman with long, dark, curly hair and blue eyes. She would be twenty-three now. Her birthday was 8th March. Rachel would see her hair first, moving through the sea of people, then her face, in profile – but she would know at once that it was her and would start walking towards her. The commuters would part in front of her, getting out of her way. A mood would go through the crowd – they knew, somehow, that something momentous was about to happen – and they would gradually back off, silent, watching. Then Lauren would turn towards her and start walking in her direction. As they got closer the other faces would vanish completely, and then there would be just the two of them standing across from each other, Rachel’s heart beating wildly, recognition in their eyes. Rachel would open her arms and Lauren would wrap her own around her waist. They would stand still, hugging each other, crying with relief and grief and joy. Rachel would finally feel that she had found her home again. She belonged. Because Lauren was back.

  It was a myth. She knew the reality, knew that if such a thing were to ever come about it would be very different, much more confusing, filled with an intense sadness. Because the years between would be lost to them for ever, whatever had gone on. Twenty-two years of irrevocable separation. And because they would neither of them stand a chance of recognising the other. But hope feeds on myths, and without hope she would be dead. Long ago dead, wrists slashed, unable to contemplate the horror of the truth. The myth had kept her alive.

  But now it was gone. She had gone to sleep tonight, for the first time ever, without doing it, without imagining the reunion. So now, in the early hours, lying alone in John’s bed while she waited for him to come back with his own child, now she felt – perhaps for the first time in her life – that she had really lost something that would never come back, something that had been taken from her so long ago – her child, her meaning, her self. The truth was only just sinking in now. Because tonight, also for the first time, she had believed that her daughter was dead. She had thought that thought. The invisible connection between them – the thing she had cherished like an imaginary friend down through the years, her tiny little grain of absolute madness – that link that she had been able to actually physically sense, as if it were a smell in her nose, or a sensation under her fingertips – that was gone. Lauren had left her.

  She couldn’t work out what it meant, that she had vanished. Did it mean Lauren had died, just now, this day? Or just that she was herself only now waking up to reality? She hadn’t a clue. At first – when the link had first snapped – she had been with John and something else had opened up inside her, a channel to him, instead of a channel to Lauren. When God closes one door, he opens another. That’s what the nuns had taught her at school, so long ago. But her belief in God had slipped quietly away long before Lauren had been taken, and not even all that trauma and all that need had been able to bring it back, no matter how much she had desired that.

  Tonight, she had fallen asleep in John’s arms and had felt only relief, an immense weight lifted from her. She had, in a way, chosen not to go there, not to think those thoughts, not to imagine her child again. She had chosen to let her go. But only because there had been no option. Because the link was already gone. She had felt that with absolute clarity. The link was gone. She had even said it to John, told him what it meant – that she no longer believed her daughter was still alive. She had somehow actually said that to another person, then gone on to do other things with him, intimate things. As if it were all finally behind her, the act no longer necessary – she had become what she had so long only pretended to be – a normal, healthy woman.

  But it wasn’t true. She knew now, at four in the morning, lying alone and cold, she knew now that she would never be normal, that everything was still somehow an act. What had happened between John and her had meant something profound. She had no doubt about that. It had been beautiful. Something she had never imagined would come to her again. But now it seemed
only bitter, a species of disgusting animal treachery. As if she had traded Lauren for John. She rolled on to her side under the covers and pulled her knees up to her chest. She could feel the blackness rising up around her. She groaned and prayed that John would hurry, that he would return soon.

  41

  Tom leaned on the wall at the corner of the street and scrutinised the parked cars and silent spaces. The street was dead. No lights in the houses, curtains all closed. No sign of anything he should watch out for. His own car was still on his drive, where he had left it three and a half days ago. He had come full circle. As if nothing had happened.

  He crossed the street and took the service alley that ran alongside number 42, then down the back of all the gardens. Some people used it for their rubbish and he heard cats, maybe even foxes, scrambling away from the wheelie bins as he made his way cautiously past the overgrown hedges and broken fence slats, watching far ahead for any sign that someone might be waiting at his house. But as he got closer he was sure he was alone. There was no one watching for him.

  He walked up through his short garden until the automatic tungsten light dazzled him, then lifted the mat outside the little shed at the top of the garden, retrieved the back-door key and unlocked the door. Inside the alarm system bleeped its warning and he switched it off, then leaned on the kitchen counter for a few moments, catching his breath. His head was spinning, he felt nauseous. But it settled after a few deep breaths and he checked the house without being sick or collapsing. Everything was as it had been three days ago. No one had been in.

  He pulled the soiled clothing off and went up the stairs naked. He couldn’t travel around with blood all over him. That would attract unwanted attention. He needed to stay free and unimpeded. He was the only person who could get to Sara quickly enough. He was certain of that.

  He turned the shower on and stood under it without waiting for it to warm up, sucking his breath in. As it warmed he washed the blood off him, stood with the water running through his hair until the dirty brown stream turned clear. Then he dried himself quickly and put fresh clothes on. He took a maximum dose of some painkillers he’d been given for a twisted ankle some years ago, something stronger than ibuprofen. He didn’t actually have any pain at all right now, not even from his ribs, which had hurt with every breath all the way through the car journey with his father. The adrenalin had taken over, he thought. Or maybe this was just what happened – you got used to it. Tomorrow might be a different story. Either way, he didn’t have time to think about what was hurting and what wasn’t.

  In the kitchen he wolfed bread, ham and cheese, without bothering to make a sandwich with it all. Then a bar of chocolate. He drank a full bottle of some sports drink, promising energy via caffeine and sugar. He was still starving. But there wasn’t time to eat more. He opened the connecting door to the garage and found the baseball bat he kept there, along with other sporting kit he kept meaning to use with Jamie. From a locked cabinet he took out a spare mobile, checked it was still charged and fired it up. It had never been used, but it had a duplicate of his SIM card. It was his father who had taught him to keep spare, untraceable mobiles. He should have had one like this when he had made the call to Alex fucking Renton, three years ago.

  He locked the doors and went out to his car, put the bat in the back and started the engine. As the car slipped down his drive he checked the time on the dash. Coming up to five in the morning. He reckoned he had used up about thirty-five minutes of his three hours. It would only take another ten minutes to get to Alex’s house, so if Alex was in and his dad stuck to the deal he would be OK. Plenty of time to do what he had to.

  There was no question of John just driving off and waiting three hours. Did Tom really think he would do that? Maybe he hadn’t even considered it. John could see that his head was filled with extreme images, all his concentration taken up with what he thought he had to do – which was rescue the girl, even if that meant confronting the thug who had just kicked seven bells out of him. There was a spark of something heroic in that, John realised, something which made him smile despite his fears. Tom had once got a judge’s commendation for arresting a masked, armed robber, John remembered. The gun hadn’t been loaded, but Tom hadn’t known that. And there’d been some citizen’s bravery thing for pulling a child out of the Thames. All this before the mistake that got him kicked out. The tosser who had just beat him was the author of that mistake. That might make for a lot of getting even in Tom’s confused head. So there was no chance at all that John was just going to leave him to it.

  So he had watched Tom until he had passed the end of the street, then got out of the car and followed him to the corner. He leaned on the wall Tom had only just rested against and peered down towards his house. After about five minutes lights had started to go on, downstairs, then upstairs. He had walked farther down the street, until he was in earshot. He couldn’t hear blows or screams, or any other sign of immediate trouble, so he had walked quickly back to the car, started it up and moved it so that it was almost at the corner and he could see Tom’s driveway without getting out. He had watched and waited.

  His own head was swimming with conflicting demands. The information Tom had given him was organising itself slowly. He sifted it methodically, while he watched in silence. He put together a chronological sequence of all the events – everything his son had told him he’d been through – then a separate list of things he would follow up – if he were running an inquiry. Which he was, in a way, because Grenser had never gone away. He was still doing it, still thinking like an SIO. It was automatic.

  Did all this his son was going through have something to do with Lauren Gower’s kidnap twenty-two years ago? That was the huge question. His instincts told him there was no coincidence. He slotted together various key pieces of information to back that up – including his son’s link to Sara Eaton. He tried to pull back from his memory everything they knew about Sara Eaton, and couldn’t believe that it was hardly anything at all. She was a footnote to the inquiry, born after the event. The child of a woman who was herself a marginal witness. How old had Tom said she was? Twenty? Twenty-one on Friday. He rubbed his temples furiously. It was an easy thing to forge birth certificates. She could be twenty-three on Friday, without even knowing it.

  He couldn’t believe he was considering that. It made him exhale deeply. Was that what he was considering?

  What he should have been doing was ignoring the little pact with Tom and calling it in. It was a kidnapping. The girl – whoever she was – would be in danger. This Renton had information that might be worked out of him, information that might be time-crucial. Except Tom was right on that – Renton wasn’t going to give anything away without violence, and this wasn’t the seventies. But to get in among the perpetrators, quickly – that might disrupt things, throw a spanner in the works. It might kill her too – his son was correct on that.

  But that wasn’t a concern that could stop them doing something. They had to do something. ‘They’. Who was he kidding? He wasn’t even a part of them any longer. And the last thing he wanted was to put Sara Eaton in danger.

  The reality was that no one was going to discover anything fast. They would have to wait for the ransom demands, take it from there. But he should at least – in that case – be warning them to get in contact with her father. Right now. No delay. Delay was what turned abduction cases into murders. But this was more professional. They would be after money, not sex. They weren’t going to kill her – whoever they were – unless there was a threat to them. Tom was right again.

  And what if his crazy suppositions were right? What if? Then Freddie Eaton wasn’t her father and all bets were off as to what exactly was going on here. Could he really risk contacting Freddie Eaton, given that possibility?

  His thoughts were interrupted as Tom came out on to his drive, hands full. John saw a stick of some sort, a baseball bat or a metal bar, he couldn’t see clearly. Tom was making no attempt to hide it. He put it in
the back of his car, got in, and seconds later the car was sliding back into the road. John swallowed hard. What the fuck was Tom thinking about? He lay himself flat across the passenger seat. He wondered whether Tom knew what he drove, whether he had even noticed. He waited until he heard the car turning in front of him, then switched the engine on and sat up. He could see the tail lights ahead. He waited until they went round the bend, then pulled out after them.

  42

  The man was right in front of Sara, kneeling there, inches away, a plate of something held out towards her. He spoke to her quietly, said something in Russian. She didn’t get it, but she recognised him. She could barely keep her eyes open, but she knew who he was, knew the scarred face, his voice. The same man who had come into the car and drugged her. The man she had shot at on the island, the man who had killed all her friends. She tried to pull away from him, to shrink back, but something was holding her in place, dragging painfully at her leg. And her head kept sinking back, her eyes rolling up. What had they given her? ‘Don’t drug me again,’ she pleaded, with a feeble, pathetic voice. ‘No more of that … I won’t run …’ She felt so sick. She just wanted to be able to sit up without her head spinning, open her eyes properly, wake up, work out what was happening to her. She could smell the food on the plate, but it made her stomach turn. Something was very sore at her side, or under her arm. What had they done to her? She could hear herself retching, but there was nothing coming up. How long was it since she had last eaten? She collapsed back into something soft and lay there panting, felt the queasy, terrifying fog creeping up again …

  The next thing she knew she was sitting up and drinking, her head groggy. The same man was there, holding a cup of water to her lips, speaking softly to her, again in Russian, so she still understood very little. Normally she could do it, but not now, not like this. She tried to say that – that she didn’t speak Russian, only French or English. She didn’t want him to know that she spoke some Russian. But then suddenly the water took effect and her head was very clear. Her eyes moved around and took in the scene – the essential elements of it. She saw the enclosed space, the mattress she was sitting on, her torn clothes, the dim light bulbs, the dirty metal walls, the thick shackle digging into her ankle and pinning her to the floor, that man’s face right there beside her. She remembered at once what was happening and jolted back, away from him, so the water spilled all over. She opened her mouth to scream but he lunged towards her, knocking her backwards and pressing a rough, massive hand over her face. His body pinned her as he hissed in her ear, in English this time, telling her not to scream, to shut up. Her chest began to heave – she couldn’t breathe with his hand blocking her mouth, his weight on top of her – she tried to nod to him. He took his hand away and she gasped for air. ‘Don’t scream – it will hurt my ears,’ he said, then sighed and stood up, moving back from her. ‘And it’s useless,’ he added. ‘No one can hear you here. Besides, I’m not here to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you. You understand? You’re not going to be hurt if you cooperate.’