You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  It had been another lie.

  I picked up the pace and, inside, saw her on the far side of the concourse at a ticket machine. She was feeding coins into it, the Post-it note in her hand again. She made for the barriers. The station was busy, so it was easy to remain hidden, but then she surprised me again: instead of heading south to Waterloo, she made for the northbound platform on the Northern line.

  I tried to work out what was happening, where she might be going, and fifteen minutes later I found out: she exited at Chalk Farm. Once she got back to the surface, she paused, and took out the Post-it note again. I was behind the barriers, still too far away to see it in any detail, but it looked like it was entirely covered with writing. Was it directions? Instructions? Briefly, she checked her watch again, then moved out into the night.

  She crossed Haverstock Hill and went north along a narrow road walled in by a succession of faceless offices and warehouses. I dropped back, her silhouette passing in and out of the lights as the street curved around to the left. When she came back into view, she’d changed direction again, cutting between a community centre – a paint-peeled relic from the seventies – and an ugly red-brick building which appeared to be the first in a zigzag of identical five-storey flats. Beyond them were a tower block and a deserted children’s play park.

  I headed around the park and came to a halt. She took the staircase belonging to the second five-storey building, the steps spiralling up the side in a concrete corkscrew, and on the fifth floor made her way along the walkway. It was open, exposed to the elements, and as a sudden gust of wind ripped in, she pulled up the collar on her coat and dipped her chin, then came to a stop two flats from the end.

  She stood there for a moment, checking the Post-it note yet again, staring at it, as if it might come alive in her hands – and then she placed a hand to the door and pushed. It swung open.

  The door had been unlatched.

  As she disappeared inside, I tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Why had she come here? Who did the flat belong to? I thought about heading up there, confronting her, trying to get her to tell me why she was doing this, but as the door shut behind her, I forced myself to stay where I was. If I stormed up there, it might scare her – especially because she’d realize that she’d been followed – and that would only harden Field’s position, perhaps confirm her worst fears about me. I didn’t want to end up in handcuffs, arrested, my opportunity to find out the truth about this woman gone. I didn’t need some court order hemming me in either. Field’s warning to me, about getting something shiny and official signed off, was a test. At its crassest, it may even have been another piece of bait. She wanted to see if I would take it; if I might be that kidnapper, or that abuser, the person who’d slashed the woman’s arm in a fit of rage, and scared her enough not to talk about it.

  I wasn’t going to play into her hands.

  I took note of the address and headed back to the Tube, starting a search on the way. Without an actual name for the woman – not the name she believed she shared with my wife – directory enquiries was basically worthless to me, so I switched tack: I went to my Contacts, scrolled through the list of names and called a man named Spike, an old source of mine from my newspaper days. I often used him to do background checks for me, had used him for other, less legitimate things too, and while I didn’t pretend what he did for me was legal – or particularly ethical – I accepted his help because sometimes it was the only way to get quick answers. I didn’t know his real name, I didn’t know where he lived, all I knew was that he was Russian and that when he was done helping me, I’d drop his money off in a locker at a north London sports centre.

  ‘David,’ he said once he’d picked up. ‘How’s things?’

  ‘Good, Spike – you?’

  ‘Can’t complain,’ he said, his Eastern European accent heavily anglicized now. ‘You got something fun for me?’

  ‘I need to run a background check.’

  ‘Okay. What’s the name?’

  ‘Erik McMillan.’ I spelt it out for him. ‘I need absolutely everything you can get on him. He’s a doctor, a psychiatrist at St Augustine’s – it’s a unit out in Thamesmead. Start with who he is: personal details, marriage status, that sort of thing, and where he lives; and then anything else you find out beyond that will be a bonus.’

  ‘You want his phone records?’

  I thought about it – but not for long.

  He was playing dirty. I was going to have to as well.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘if you can get them, do it.’

  When I was done with Spike, I called St Augustine’s. I hit an automated message with options to be connected to various people in different departments, but none of them was Erik McMillan and the bored-sounding voice on the recording said that the public-facing parts of the hospital were doing truncated hours because of Christmas. I checked my watch, saw it was seven forty-five, and thought about leaving a message. The recording said that, if I did, someone at St Augustine’s would call me back as soon as possible. I hung up instead. I needed to cool off first, and it would be better to get hold of the background check on McMillan before making any approach. By calling him now, speaking to him, I was playing into Field’s hands again, and immediately giving McMillan an advantage; all I could fight with at the moment was anger. That would make me sloppy.

  Worse, my emotional state would make me easy to manipulate.

  I needed to be clear-headed, I needed time to think, but – even as I told myself that – it was hard to let the anger go. On the train home, again and again I tried to imagine who the woman was, how she knew so much, what her endgame was, and what McMillan’s part in all of this might be. If the woman had been a patient at St Augustine’s then that explained their connection, but it didn’t explain why he would tell the police he’d treated me for fifteen months. If Field found out he was lying to her, which would happen eventually, he risked his job, his reputation, even his freedom, which seemed an insane risk to take for someone in his position.

  Unless he was confident he could prove everything.

  And that meant one of two things: either his lies could be backed up somehow, making them more convincing than I’d feared – or he was telling the truth.

  And, if that was the case, I really was sick.

  11

  Except for the watery yellow glow of the security light at the front, my house was completely dark. It was a three-bedroomed bungalow, unusual for this part of the city, which Derryn and I had signed the contract on the year before we’d moved to the States. We’d only lived in it for nine months before the move, and for just eleven after we got back to the UK, and once she was gone, what had seemed such a perfect size before – such an ideal place to start the family we’d always wanted – suddenly felt too big; it was empty, almost paralysingly so. Because of that, for over a year I was unable to sleep in the bed we’d shared, barely able to set foot in our bedroom, choosing to fall asleep on the sofa instead, in front of the TV night after night. Since then, I’d moved beyond those moments, but it still felt like a home I’d always been alone in, a place that Derryn had never had the chance to enjoy; and because of that, I was never really sure if I liked it in a way a home was supposed to be liked. If a home was a castle, some sort of bastion, a place to seek refuge, this place had failed.

  I turned on the lamp in the hallway and then the Christmas lights. They exploded into life outside, wrapped in diagonal lines along the guttering and the downpipes. This time of year tended to hurt: Derryn had loved Christmas, the decorations, the trees, the festivities. The lights had been chosen by her and, every year since she’d passed, I’d put them up as a way to remember that, as a simple way to touch a small part of who she’d been. I watched them as they winked red and yellow and blue, pink, purple, but somehow the colour, the joy, didn’t feel like it belonged here after today. I reached down and switched them off, pushed the door closed and stood in the silence of the hallway, listening to the m
uted tick of the central heating.

  As I did, I felt the same fears start to surface again.

  In quiet moments alone since my blackout, since the headaches had started, I’d sometimes considered the idea that I might be ill. It never seemed impossible to me that it might be the reason I’d been so incapable of moving beyond Derryn’s death for so long; that I might be falling apart, being destroyed somehow, cell by cell – quietly, slowly, over months and years – without even knowing. Those worries were ones I’d carried with me for a long time now. Some kind of illness may have been the reason I couldn’t sustain other relationships, why I felt so restless all the time, and why I found it so hard to settle inside these walls. It may even have been the reason that I felt such a powerful connection to missing people and why I’d gone to such lengths to track them down. I was obsessed about saving them – sometimes, often, dangerously so – and while all of me railed against the suggestion that I’d spent fifteen months in an institution and didn’t remember any of it – that I was suffering from a psychological condition where I refused to recognize or accept that my wife was alive and well – the idea of a sickness, one that was more subtle and masked, was much harder to expel. Its claws were already in me.

  Through the window at the side of the house, I could see into next door’s living room, my neighbours Andrew and Nicola sitting beside one another on the sofa, watching something on TV, a wine bottle on the table in front of them. I hardly knew them, had barely spoken to them in the entire three years they’d been living a few feet away, but as I looked at them now, I felt totally alone and besieged by jealousy. I knew why, I knew the reasons, and I knew none of this was their fault. They hadn’t brought that woman to the police. They hadn’t caused my blackouts or my headaches. I was driven by a compulsion I’d never been able to articulate, and which controlled me during cases, and none of that was down to them. But it hurt me to look at them, just as it hurt me to watch someone pretending to be my wife. And that was exactly what made me so vulnerable: I pretended I was clad in armour, I made my enemies believe I couldn’t be bruised, or threatened, or scared. But I could. I could be broken.

  And the way to do it was so simple.

  All they had to do was use Derryn.

  #0430

  Do you remember the day we first met? I do. It was a Tuesday morning in March and the sun was streaming in, casting strobes of light from every window. I looked around at all the faces and everybody’s skin had this ethereal glow, like something had caught light inside them. It had been a long winter, I suppose, so maybe the burst of bright sunlight just looked odd and out of place for a moment; or maybe it was you. The way you were. The way you could walk into a room and light it up.

  That’s not an exaggeration, by the way.

  I might have romanticized the sunlight thing, the ethereal glow and all of that stuff, but I’m not overplaying this. Honestly. It was your eyes, the way you greeted people, the way you eventually greeted me. You know how some people don’t smile from their eyes? Over the years, you must have seen that a lot in your job. I mean, you can see their face moving, you can see muscles and cartilage and whatever else shifting and changing, but you know it’s not an emotional reaction to something – not an act of joy or spontaneity – because there’s no light in their eyes when they don’t mean it. But when you smiled, it was different. When you smiled, it genuinely came from somewhere good.

  There’s this book I’ve always loved – I’ve read it over and over again – called Garden Apex. In it, the author describes people like that who don’t smile from their eyes. She says their eyes are like caves carved out of a granite cliff. I suppose she means that everything you see on that cliff face is resolute and unyielding – sometimes impossible to break or chip away at, even over a whole lifetime – while the caves are so inaccessible and so difficult to see into that there’s absolutely no hint of what lies beyond, what secrets may be hiding within, so you’re never sure if the cliff and the caves are dangerous. Anyway, I love that description because I’ve met so many people like that. On certain days, I’ll even admit to looking in the mirror and seeing someone like that staring back. But you were never one of those people. You were never like me.

  You always had that light in your eyes.

  And, I suppose, that was one of the reasons I was drawn to you. I remember watching you work your way around the room, going from bed to bed, smiling at people, and the closer you got to me, the more nervous I became. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. I didn’t want to be just another patient.

  I wanted you to like me.

  ‘Good morning,’ you said.

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘How are you feeling today?’

  I shrugged. ‘Sore.’

  ‘Well, you’re in the right place.’ You smiled and then leaned down and started raising my bed up, the silence filled with the high-pitched squeal of the mechanism. ‘I’m one of the nurses on duty today, so I’ll be looking after you.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Is there anything I can get you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, and glanced at your badge.

  You were a senior nurse.

  You were called Derryn.

  ‘What a beautiful name,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you,’ you replied, and then you smiled again, and if I’d had any doubts before, they were gone after that. From that moment, I knew for sure.

  You were someone very special.

  12

  For a long time after my father died, the cottage he’d lived in in south Devon had remained empty, except for when I’d drive down a couple of times a year to check on it. Those were the days before I knew Annabel and the first years after Derryn had passed on, so I never had a reason to be there. There was a short period, after a case I’d worked had almost cost me my life, when I did spend some time there recovering, but mostly I never went unless I had to. The house was just another repository for bad memories, a reminder of the people I’d lost, until – at the end of 2014 – a man called Bryan Kennedy became my tenant.

  Kennedy wasn’t his real name, even though that was the name in the passport I’d organized for him. We never used his real name any more because, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, that man had died three years ago. It had taken some getting used to on both our parts, but I pushed for us to use ‘Kennedy’, even in conversations with one another, because then it would feel less unusual. As I was making dinner, he called.

  I toyed with the idea of letting it go to voicemail. I felt tired, overwhelmed, way out to sea with no sign of the shore and no idea of where I was heading. But then I realized that, if anyone understood that sensation, it would be Kennedy. If I told him about the woman, about the lies she was trying to sell, he would believe me – instantly, without question – because, like me, he’d had to watch a person die who he loved deeply, perhaps above all others, and when she did, he found out the same thing as I had: you couldn’t lie about the people you loved – and no one could replace them.

  ‘How’s things?’ I asked.

  ‘You know: same old, same old.’

  I’d last spoken to him on Christmas Eve, calling him because I knew he’d be alone, and at this time of year, that was hard. Kennedy had been a cop once; now he worked on a fishing trawler. That was maybe even harder for him, so when we’d spoken, I’d let him talk for an hour about his days at the Met, and about working over Christmas.

  ‘Have you had a good break?’

  ‘It’s been all right,’ he said. ‘Back to work on Saturday. Got to work Sunday too. Don’t know what the point of going out New Year’s Eve is but I’ll be back in time for the huge party I’m hosting.’

  I smiled; it felt unnatural, as if I’d forgotten how to do it. It hadn’t even been a day since I’d left Annabel and Olivia, but it felt like months.

  ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you?’ he went on. ‘I’m throwing a party in the front room. Women, booze, drugs. It’s fancy dress, so
I’m going as a leprechaun.’

  I smiled again. ‘Well, it’s important to stay true to your roots.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He stopped, and I heard him take a drink of something. He’d been off the booze for three years, so I imagined it was tea. ‘Weather’s supposed to be shite next week. There’s a storm coming and we’re going to get four weeks of rain in a day, so I guess I’ll be home in front of the TV for a change.’

  ‘I hope you’ve got some movies on tape.’

  ‘It feels like I’ve watched them all.’

  Kennedy didn’t have the Internet at the cottage. He didn’t have a mobile phone or a driving licence or credit cards either. I paid for the electricity and gas and water, and then he gave me the cash when the bills came. His passport was his only ID and that was there solely to aid him in a quick escape, should he need it. We never spoke about the reasons why we’d ended up here, the decisions he’d made, but both of us could still feel the echoes of them: the blackout I’d suffered had been during the course of trying to help him; my headaches had started then too. Kennedy’s daughter, Leanne, had been murdered, a case he’d been leading had spiralled completely out of control, and in the aftermath he’d suffered a heart attack and nearly died.

  The scars ran deep for both of us.

  Eventually, he said, ‘So what have you been up to?’

  ‘I got back to London today.’

  ‘How come? I thought you were staying with Annabel until the new year?’

  ‘I was. But something’s come up.’

  ‘Are the girls all right?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not them. They’re fine, don’t worry. Liv’s a proper teenager now.’

  Kennedy made a noise down the phone, a breath that said he remembered those days. ‘That’s what happens,’ he said, and a hint of sorrow crept into his voice. ‘They learn to walk – and the next minute they’re taller than you and they’re leaving home …’ He faded out, the line quiet for a moment. ‘So why are you back?’