The Vanishing

by John Connor

  ‘Her father tried to kill her? Is that what you said just now? Her own father? Didn’t you tell me Freddie Eaton was her father?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I said. But he’s not her father. And Elizabeth Wellbeck was not her mother.’ He pushed the DNA results over to her. She didn’t look at them. She was turning bright red. ‘What is that?’ she asked, rigidly. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s DNA results. They show Freddie Eaton was not her father …’

  ‘The DNA results for this girl you’re talking about? For Sara Eaton?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You compared her DNA and Freddie Eaton’s? That’s the man who was married to Elizabeth Wellbeck?’

  ‘Yes. And he’s not Sara Eaton’s father. But we didn’t just run that comparison …’ He took a gulp and clutched the side of the table. ‘We ran yours too. Your DNA, from the inquiry. We ran a comparison …’

  She started to cry immediately. She saw it coming.

  ‘It’s her, Rachel,’ he said. ‘Sara Eaton is Lauren. It’s her.’ His voice was like a strangled gasp. He realised suddenly he was going to start crying as well.

  ‘I can’t believe it …’ she stuttered. ‘I thought it was going to be a body … the remains …’

  ‘No. No body. She’s alive and well. She’s beautiful. She even looks like you. In her eyes. I can see you in her eyes. There’s no doubt. No doubt at all. The DNA is certain. We found her, Rachel. We found her …’ He couldn’t keep still any longer. He thought he was going to explode, burst out of the top of his head. He jumped up from the table, pulled her to him and held her face between his hands. ‘It’s Lauren,’ he said, laughing. ‘It’s Lauren. She’s alive. She’s alive, Rachel. It really is her.’

  She closed her eyes, the tears really pouring now. She started to giggle through them. He pulled her to him and let it start to come, let twenty years of it rise to the surface. They were laughing and crying, holding each other so tightly that it was painful.

  58

  Friday, 27 April 2012

  When she had thought about it, imagined it – this moment – Rachel had forgotten about Roger. Lauren’s father. John had reminded her yesterday that he would have to be present too when she met Sara, unless they could both agree something different. There was no need for that – he should be there, of course – but she just hadn’t imagined him there.

  She’d forgotten the press problems too. There had been a lot of that twenty-two years ago, and again in 2003, when John had reviewed the case. She had been used to it all then, learned how to deal with it as a necessity, because publicity was something that could help find Lauren. But now it bewildered her. She had got up this morning and there they were, hanging around outside her house, more and more of them. Cameras flashing as she pulled the curtains. John had been annoyed, though not surprised. Someone at the police had leaked it, he said. It was all good publicity for the police, though they’d in fact had little to do with it.

  By midday it was a scrum and the local police were putting up barriers. John assured her they would leave her after the meeting. They changed the location of the meeting, though. Sara Eaton had said she would meet them anywhere, apparently. Rachel hadn’t known what to do about that. When she had imagined it they were always in a crowded public space. But that was just her silly dreams. In the end she’d asked if Sara could just come here, to Fulham, to her home. Now they had changed it at the last minute to John’s place on the river in Hammersmith. She had managed to get out of her house the back way, with police assistance, and, as far as she knew, no one had followed them. They were in John’s main room now, Roger and her, sitting at John’s table, waiting. John was down in the hallway, keeping a discreet distance, talking to the people who were there from Grenser. It was all very odd, very uncomfortable. She wished Roger were not here at all. She wished it were John sitting beside her. She wanted him to hold her hand. Roger had given up on Lauren long ago. John hadn’t.

  Roger was talking a lot. She just wanted to sit in silence. She felt very calm, much calmer than she imagined she would be. There was a powerful sensation of unreality, but she had anticipated that – like she was floating through a story someone else had written, someone else’s story, or like she wasn’t really there, couldn’t really hear or see properly, though she could, of course. She could see and hear everything with great clarity, every tiny detail. She had thought about all the possible issues and problems that might arise – over the years she had thought about them all, over and over again, imagining every possibility. She had expected, waking up this morning, to feel grim. That was how she had imagined it. Because the reality of what had happened was grim. She was waiting now to meet a daughter she really could no longer do anything for, that she had no relationship with. Because someone had taken away all the years when she was meant to have been there for Sara, or Lauren, all the years she was meant to give her love and be her mother. They had been stolen, with the child. And there was no going back on any of that, no recovery of what was gone. It was gone for ever. The woman who would arrive was an adult. She didn’t need a mother any more. What did she need? Maybe just to fill in some gaps in her history, to satisfy a curiosity. Maybe she wouldn’t want anything to do with Rachel at all. John had told her all about Sara’s wealth. She lived in a different world to the sad, deformed thing that Rachel had been moving around in for the past twenty-two years. She hadn’t been stricken with loss. Until a few days ago she hadn’t even known that Rachel was her real mother.

  In fact, she’d had – until recently – a different mother. Liz Wellbeck. A woman Rachel had met many times. She had even met her – years ago now – during the period when Liz Wellbeck must already have had Sara, stashed away somewhere secret, her child. Liz had stood in her clinic and spoken to her and sympathised with Rachel, and all the time she had known that back at her home, somewhere, Rachel’s child was there, alive and well. It brought a terrible lump to Rachel’s throat when she considered this – that Liz Wellbeck, a woman who had enough money to buy almost anything you could name, her ex-employer, someone she had always respected for her charity work – this woman had wreaked this misery on her, knowingly. It brought a lump to her throat because it shattered at a stroke illusions that might still have remained hers, a source of some kind of optimism about humanity. It said something about evil, about its existence. It wasn’t just the taking of her child, more the keeping her in the dark about Lauren, deliberately refusing her any succour, so that Rachel hadn’t ever known whether her baby was dead, alive, or in the hands of some child abuser. Liz Wellbeck had looked her in the eyes, with all that going on, knowing that was what Rachel was suffering, and said absolutely nothing. The woman was monstrous, an embodiment of a kind of evil that Rachel hadn’t thought real. Or had only imagined. And that idea was very hard to reconcile with the fact that Liz Wellbeck – however evil she seemed to Rachel – had brought up her child, had probably loved her (how could you not love her – and why steal her if you didn’t?), had been Lauren’s actual mother. How was she meant to skate around that subject with Sara Eaton?

  Roger didn’t seem to have these worries. He was excited like a little kid, talking away about it. There didn’t seem to be any resentment of John. But why should there be? Roger had left her. He had a new wife now, two kids of his own. He had a successful career. He had decided long ago that Lauren was dead and he had dealt with that. This now was like some fantastic surprise, a gift he had never expected. She resisted the urge to turn to him and say, But what about our lives, Roger, our ruined lives?

  If she could have exerted more control over this whole process she would have taken things much more slowly. This meeting – this thing that was about to happen to them – wasn’t really a meeting for her, or for Roger or Sara. It was like a wedding, she thought. Some kind of public ritual. It was what happened when they found someone who had been lost, it was what had to happen – there had to be a publicised first meeting, the reunion. It existed because ther
e was a social expectation about it, a social rule. Just like the wedding ceremony. That wasn’t for the two people getting married – it was for everyone else. What she was about to go through would be private, of course, but the fact that it was happening was very public. There would even be press statements later, she assumed. The detectives from the inquiry would need to say something to the world. And the world was right to want to know. There was nothing prurient about it. What had happened was massive. She understood it all. But if she could have kicked against it what she would have preferred was to have seen pictures of Sara first, so as to know what to expect. John had said he would arrange that, but in the end it had all just steamed ahead and rolled right over him too, so she now had no idea what Sara Eaton looked like. She would have preferred to have emailed her maybe. Email was such an easy way to communicate, at a distance. Or speak to her by phone. Why did intermediaries have to organise this meeting for her? There was no need for that. She should have just been able to speak to her daughter, find out what she thought about it all. They could have arranged something for a couple of weeks’ time. That would have given them both time to get used to it all, to assimilate the shock. But instead, here they all were, a day after the DNA tests were confirmed.

  And yet, despite all that, she didn’t feel grim, or depressed. The overwhelming expectation she was experiencing wasn’t quite joyful – there was too much uncertainty around it for it to get anywhere near that – but it felt like it could be something new, not something old, the start of something, not the end. And that was a positive feeling, one she hadn’t expected at all.

  There were noises from the stairs now, people coming up. The time was coming. She stood up. Roger stood too, suddenly silent. The door opened and John walked in, smiling. Behind him was a tall, young woman with a very pale face and short, blonde hair – it was dyed, someone had told her, and naturally dark. She was wearing a pair of black jeans, a green sweater with a polo neck, flat black shoes. She was looking at her, staring straight at Rachel as she walked across the room.

  Rachel collapsed back into her chair. She saw it at once, in the eyes, in the face. She saw herself. She realised with a jolting shock that until right now, this very moment, a part of her hadn’t believed it. There was the science, the DNA, everything they were telling her. But she hadn’t believed it. Now she could see it. It was Lauren, it was her daughter.

  She started to cry stupidly, still looking at the woman. Roger was going forward to her, his hand held out to shake her hand like she were a friend, introducing himself, stammering nervously. The woman looked away from her, tears in her eyes now, but a smile on her face. She shook Roger’s hand and held it, spoke to him, then embraced him and put her head against his shoulder. Rachel couldn’t hear what she was saying to him. She could only hear the blood rushing through her ears. Sara came past Roger and sat down next to her. But Rachel couldn’t look at her. All she could see was the day she had vanished. The daffodil she had picked for her, Lauren’s little legs kicking in delight as she had held it. It was the same baby sitting next to her now, grown up into something incredible. She was beautiful, so beautiful and self-assured that Rachel thought her face might burn if she looked directly at her. As if she were an angel. She hung her head instead and wept while Sara just sat beside her, a hand on her arm, waiting.

  About the Author

  John Connor left his job as a barrister to write full time. During the fifteen years of his legal career, he prosecuted numerous homicide cases in West Yorkshire and London. He advised the police in several drugs cases and organised-crime operations, many involving covert activity. He now lives in Brussels with his family.

  By John Connor

  Phoenix

  The Playroom

  A Child’s Game

  Falling

  Unsafe

  The Vanishing

  Copyright

  An Orion ebook

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Orion Books

  Ebook first published in 2013 by Orion Books

  This updated ebook published in 2014 by Orion Books

  © John Connor 2013

  The right of John Connor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-4091-3365-0

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk