Shatter

by Michael Robotham

  He whispers. “They’re going to kill me, Joe. And if I die, you’ll never find Julianne and Charlie. The ticking clock—we all have one, but I guess mine is running a little faster than most and so is your wife’s.”

  A bubble of saliva forms and bursts on my lips as I open them but no words come out.

  “I used to hate time,” he says. “I counted Sundays. I imagined my daughter growing up without me. That was mechanical time, the stuff of clocks and calendars. I deal in something deeper than that now. I collect time from people. I take it away from them.”

  Gideon makes it sound as though years can be traded between individuals. My loss can be his gain.

  “You love your daughter, Gideon. I love mine. I can’t possibly understand what you’ve been through, but you won’t let Charlie die. I know that.”

  “Is that who you want?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’re making a choice.”

  “No. I want them both. Where are they?”

  “No choice is a choice, remember?” He smiles. “Did you ask your wife about her affair? I bet she denied it and you believed her. Look at her text messages. I’ve seen them. She sent one to her boss saying that you suspected something and she couldn’t see him anymore. Do you still want to save her?”

  A blood-dark shadow shakes my heart and I want to lean across the space between us, one arm drawn back like a bow, and smash my fist into his face.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Look at her text messages.”

  “I don’t care.”

  His voice erupts in a hoarse laugh. “Yes, you do.”

  He glances at Ruiz and back to me. “I’m going to tell you what I did to your wife. I gave her a choice too. I put her in a box and told her that your daughter was in a box next to her. She could breathe through a hose and stay alive but only by taking her daughter’s air.”

  His hands are bolted to the table, yet I can feel his fingers reaching into my head, wedging between the two halves of the cerebellum, levering them apart.

  “What do you think she’ll do, Joe? Will she steal Charlie’s air to stay alive a little longer?”

  Ruiz launches himself across the room and hurls his fist into Gideon’s face with a force that would knock him down if his wrists weren’t bolted in place. I hear breaking bones.

  Gripping Gideon beneath his lower ribs, he drives his knee into his kidneys, sending bolts of pain shooting through his body. Perspiration. Empty lungs. Fear. Feces. Ruiz is screaming at him now, pounding his face with his fists, demanding to know the address. For a violent, bloody minute he takes out all his frustrations. He’s no longer a serving member of the police force. Rules don’t apply. This is what Veronica Cray meant.

  Waves of pain break and crash on Gideon’s body. His face is already beginning to bruise and swell from the beating, yet he’s not complaining or crying out.

  “Gideon,” I whisper. His eyes meet mine. “I’ll let him do it. I promise you. If you don’t tell me where they are, I’m going to let him kill you.”

  A bloody froth forms on his lips and his tongue rolls across his teeth, painting them red. An unearthly smile forms on his face as the muscles contract and relax.

  “Do it.”

  “What?”

  “Torture me.”

  I look at Ruiz, who is rubbing his fists. His knuckles are torn.

  Gideon goads me. “Torture me. Ask me the right questions. Show me how good you are.”

  He sees me hesitate and bows his head in the posture of the confessional. “What’s wrong? Don’t tell me you’re a sentimentalist. Surely you’re justified in torturing me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have the information you need. I know exactly where your wife and daughter are. It’s not like you’re uncertain or half-sure. Even if you were fifty percent certain, you’d be justified. I tortured people for far less. I tortured them because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  He stares at his hands like a man considering his future and discounting it.

  “Torture me. Make me tell you.”

  I feel as though someone somewhere has opened a sluice gate and my hostility and anger are draining away. I hate this man more than words can describe. I want to hurt him. I want him dead. But it’s not going to make any difference. He won’t tell me where they are.

  Gideon doesn’t want forgiveness or justice or understanding. He has bathed in the blood of a terrible conflict, done the bidding of governments and secret departments and shadowy organizations operating beyond the law. He has broken minds, obtained secrets, destroyed lives and saved countless more. It changed him. How could it not? Yet throughout it all, he clung to the one pure, innocent, untainted thing in his life, his daughter, until she was taken away from him.

  I can hate Gideon, but I cannot hate him more than he hates himself.

  70

  There’s another anomaly,” says Oliver Rabb, adjusting his crooked bow tie and dabbing at his forehead with a matching handkerchief.

  When I don’t answer he keeps talking. “Tyler turned on his mobile and turned it off again at 7:35 a.m. It was on for just over twenty-one seconds.”

  The information rises and falls over me.

  Oliver is looking at me expectantly. “You wanted me to check for anomalies. You seemed to think they were important. I think I know what he was doing. He was taking a photograph.”

  Finally there is awareness. It’s not a grand vision or a blinding insight. Things have become clearer, clearer than yesterday.

  Gideon took photographs of Julianne and Charlie. He used a mobile phone camera, which had to be turned on for the pictures to be taken. The anomalies can be explained. They support a theory.

  Oliver follows me upstairs, through the incident room. I don’t notice if detectives are back at their desks. I don’t notice if my left hand is pill rolling or my left arm is swinging normally. These things are unimportant.

  I go straight to the map on the wall. A second white pin is stuck alongside the first. Oliver is trying to explain his reasoning.

  “Yesterday’s anomaly happened at 3:07 p.m. The mobile was turned on for fourteen seconds but he didn’t make a call. Later, he transmitted a photograph from the same phone to your wife’s mobile. Afterwards, he left the handset on a bus.”

  He pulls the image up on-screen showing Charlie with her head encased in tape and a hosepipe in her mouth. I can almost hear the rasp of her breath through the narrow opening.

  “The second anomaly was this morning, an hour before Tyler sent the photograph of your wife.”

  Gideon knew the police could trace a mobile, which is why he kept moving and swapping his phones so regularly. He didn’t make mistakes. But this time it was different. There were two signals and two photographs.

  “Can you trace them?” I ask.

  Oliver’s eyes are gleaming. “I was struggling when there was only one, but now it might be possible.”

  I sit alongside him, unable to comprehend most of what he’s doing. Waves of numbers cross the screen as he quizzes the software, overrides error messages and circumvents problems. Oliver seems to be writing the software as he goes along.

  “Both signals were picked up by a ten-meter GSM tower in The Mall, less than half a mile from the Clifton Suspension Bridge,” he says. “The DOA points to a location west of the tower.”

  “How far?”

  “I’m going to multiply the TOA—Time of Arrival—with the signal propagation speed.”

  He types and talks, using some sort of equation to do the calculation. The answer doesn’t please him.

  “Anywhere between two hundred and twelve hundred meters.”

  Oliver takes a black marker pen and draws a large teardrop shape on the map. The narrow end is at the tower and the widest part covers dozens of streets, a section of the Avon River and half of Leigh Woods.

  “A second GSM tower picked up the signature and sent a message back but the first tower had
already established contact.” Again he points to the map. “The second tower is here. It’s the same one that carried the last mobile call to Mrs. Wheeler before she jumped.”

  Oliver goes back to his laptop. “The DOA is different. North to northeast. There’s an overlapping connectivity.”

  The science is beginning to lose me. Rising from his chair again, Oliver goes back to the map and draws a second teardrop shape, this one overlapping the first. The common area covers perhaps a thousand square yards and a dozen streets. How long would it take to door knock every house?

  “We need a satellite map,” I say.

  Oliver is ahead of me. The image on his laptop blurs and then slowly comes into focus. We appear to be falling from space. Topographical details take shape—hills, rivers, streets, the suspension bridge.

  I walk to the door and yell, “Where’s the DI?”

  A dozen heads turn. Safari Roy answers. “She’s with the Chief Constable.”

  “Get her! She has to organize a search.”

  A siren wails into the afternoon, rising from the crowded streets into a coin-colored sky. This is how it began less than four weeks ago. If I could turn back the clock would I step into that police car at the university and go to the Clifton Suspension Bridge?

  No. I’d walk away. I’d make excuses. I’d be the husband Julianne wants me to be—the one who runs the other way and shouts for help.

  Ruiz is alongside me, holding on to the roof handle as the car swings through another corner. Monk is in the front passenger seat, yelling commands.

  “Take the next left. Cut in front of this bastard. Cross over. Go round this bus. Get that arsehole’s number plate.”

  The driver punches through a red light, ignoring the screeching brakes and car horns. At least four police cars are in our convoy. A dozen more are coming from other parts of the city. I can hear them chattering over the two-way.

  The traffic is banked up along Marlborough Street and Queens Road. We pull onto the opposite side of the road onto the footpath. Pedestrians scatter like pigeons.

  The cars rendezvous in Caledonia Place alongside a narrow strip of parkland that separates it from West Mall. We’re in a wealthy area, full of large terraces, bed-and-breakfast hotels and boardinghouses. Some of them are four stories high, painted in pastel shades, with outside plumbing and window boxes. Thin wisps of smoke curl from chimneys, drifting west over the river.

  A police bus arrives carrying another twenty officers. DI Cray issues instructions, unshakable amid the melee. Officers are going door-to-door, talking to neighbors, showing photographs, making a note of any empty flats and houses. Someone must have seen something.

  I look again at the satellite map unfurled across a car bonnet. Statistics don’t make science. And all human behavior cannot be quantified by numbers or reduced to equations, no matter what someone like Oliver Rabb might think. Places are significant. Journeys are significant. Every excursion or expedition we take is a story, an inner narrative that we sometimes don’t even realize we’re following. What was Gideon’s journey? He boasted that he could melt through walls, but he was more like human wallpaper, able to blend in and become simply background while he watched houses and broke into them.

  He was there when Christine Wheeler jumped. He whispered in her ear. He must have been somewhere close. I look at the terraces, studying the skyline. The Clifton Suspension Bridge is less than two hundred yards to the west of here. I can smell the sea stink and gorse. Some of these addresses are likely to have a view of the bridge from the upper floors.

  A man rides past on a bicycle with elastic around his trouser legs to stop the fabric getting caught in the chain. A woman walks her black spaniel on the grass. I want to stop them, grasp them by the upper arms and roar into their faces, demanding to know if they have seen my wife and daughter. Instead, I stand and study the street, looking for something out of the ordinary: people in the wrong place, or the wrong clothes, something that doesn’t belong or tries too hard to belong or draws the eye for another reason.

  Gideon would have chosen a house, not a flat; somewhere away from the prying eyes of neighbors, isolated or shielded, with a driveway or a garage so he could take his vehicle off the road and move Charlie and Julianne inside without being seen. A house that is up for sale, perhaps, or one that is only used for holidays or weekends.

  I step across the muddy patch of grass and begin walking along the street. The trunks of trees are wreathed in wire and the branches shiver in the wind.

  “Where the hell are you going?” yells the DI.

  “I’m looking for a house.”

  Ruiz catches up to me and Monk is not far behind, having been sent to keep us out of trouble. I keep looking at the skyline and trying not to stumble. My cane click-clacks on the pavement as I head down the slight hill past a row of terraces and turn into Sion Lane. I still can’t see the bridge.

  The next street across is Westfield Place. A front door is open. A middle-aged woman is sweeping the steps.

  “Can you see the bridge from here?” I ask.

  “No, love.”

  “What about the top floor?”

  “The estate agent called it ‘glimpses,’ ” she laughs. “You lost?”

  I show her the photographs of Charlie and Julianne. “Have you seen either of them?”

  She shakes her head.

  “What about this man?”

  “I’d remember him,” she says, when the opposite is probably true.

  We keep moving along Westfield Place. The wind is whipping up leaves and sweet wrappers that chase each other along the gutter. Abruptly I cross the street to a brick wall with stone capping.

  “Give me a leg up,” says Ruiz, before stepping into Monk’s cupped hands and being hoisted upwards until his forearms are braced along the white painted capping.

  “It’s a garden,” he says. “There’s a house further along.”

  “Can you see the bridge?”

  “Not from here, but you might be able to see it from the top of the house. There’s a turret room.”

  He jumps down and we follow the wall, looking for a gate. Monk is now ahead. I can’t match his stride and have to run every few yards to catch up.

  Stone pillars mark the entrance to a driveway. The gates are open. Tires have crushed leaves into the puddles. A car has been here recently.

  The house is large and from another age. Overgrown with ivy on one side, it has small dark windows poking through the leaves. The roof is steep with an octagonal turret on the western corner.

  The place looks empty. Closed up. Curtains are drawn and leaves have collected on the main steps and entrance portico. I follow Monk up the steps. He rings the doorbell. Nobody answers. I call Charlie’s name and then Julianne’s, pressing my face against a slender pane of frosted glass, trying to catch the tiny vibrations of a reply. Imagining it.

  Ruiz has gone to check out a garage at the side of the house, beneath the trees. He disappears through a side door and then appears again immediately.

  “It’s Tyler’s van,” he yells. “It’s empty.”

  My head fills with tumbling and leaping emotions. Hope.

  Monk is on the phone to DI Cray. “Tell her to get an ambulance,” I say.

  He relays the message and snaps the phone shut. Then he raises his elbow and drives it hard against the glass pane, which shatters and falls inward. Reaching gingerly inside, he unlocks the door and swings it open.

  The hall is wide and paved with black-and-white tiles. It has a mirror and an umbrella stand, as well as a side table with a Chinese takeaway menu and list of emergency numbers.

  The lights are working, but the switches seem to be camouflaged against the floral wallpaper. The place has been closed up for the winter, with sheets and rugs covering the furniture and the fire grates swept clean. I imagine figures lurking unseen, hiding in corners trying not to make a sound.

  Behind us a trio of police cars streams through the gates and up the gra
vel driveway. Doors open. DI Cray leads them up the front steps.

  Gideon said Julianne and Charlie were buried in a box, breathing the same air. I don’t want to believe him. So much of what he said to people was designed to wound and to break them.

  I stand swaying in the dining room, watching a spill of light from the patio doors. There are muddy footprints on the parquetry squares.

  Ruiz has climbed the stairs. He calls to me. I mount the stairs two at a time, gripping the banister and dragging myself upwards. My cane falls from my hand and clatters down the steps to the black-and-white tiles.

  “In here,” he yells.

  I pause at the door. Ruiz is kneeling beside a narrow cast-iron bed. A child is curled on a mattress, her eyes and mouth taped shut. I do not remember uttering a sound, but Charlie’s head rises and turns to my voice and she lets out a muffled sob. Her head rocks from side to side. I have to hold her still while Ruiz finds a pair of dressmaking scissors lying on a thin mattress in another corner of the bedroom.

  His hands are shaking. So are mine. The blades of the scissors open and close gently and I peel back the tape. I am staring at her with a kind of wonderment, mouth open, still not able to believe it’s her. I meet Charlie’s blue eyes. I am seeing her through a shining fluid that will not be blinked away.

  She is dirty. Her hair has been hacked to her skull. Her skin is torn. Her wrists are bleeding. She is the most beautiful creature ever to draw breath.

  I crush her to my chest. I rock her in my arms. I want to hold her until she stops crying, until she forgets everything. I want to hold her until she remembers only the warmth of my embrace and my words in her ears and my tears on her forehead.

  Charlie is wearing a bathrobe. Her jeans are on a chair.

  “Did he…?” The words get caught in my throat. “Did he touch you?”

  She blinks at me, not understanding.

  “Did he make you do things? You can tell me. It’s OK.”

  She shakes her head and wipes her nose with her sleeve.