You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  You looked up. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘My sad story.’

  You just frowned at me.

  ‘My sad story,’ I said again.

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘You asked me if there was someone special in my life.’

  You made an ‘oh’ with your mouth.

  ‘There was,’ I said.

  ‘Nora.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what happened to Nora?’

  I shrugged. ‘She cheated on me.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  I remember looking at you then. Did you really mean that you were sorry, that you simply felt sad for me and that was the end of it? Or were you secretly pleased that things hadn’t worked out with Nora because it meant I was available?

  ‘She wasn’t the woman I thought she was.’

  You just nodded.

  ‘She lied to me.’

  This time, you looked up, your expression difficult to read.

  ‘She was seeing someone else.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ you repeated.

  ‘Life moves on, I guess.’

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  I wondered what you meant by that.

  ‘What about you?’ I said.

  You finished the bandaging, not responding, applying tape to the top of the gauze, before ensuring all sides of the dressing were properly secure. You then stood, still saying nothing, and began to gather up some torn wrappers, the roll of tape.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked again.

  ‘The doctor should be around shortly,’ you replied. ‘He’ll ask some questions, make sure everything’s all right, and then you’ll finally be able to escape this place.’

  You smiled at me, but this time I hardly noticed.

  Instead, I blurted out, ‘You don’t wear a wedding ring.’

  It was the wrong thing to say, and I knew it instantly. It sounded crass and insensitive, like I was somehow putting the blame on you for not being married. I didn’t mean that at all, but it was too late to do anything about it. The words had escaped, they’d been spoken, and now I had to deal with the fallout.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘That came out wrong.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Can you forgive me?’

  You smiled again. ‘There’s nothing to forgive.’

  DAY TWO

  * * *

  17

  My phone woke me.

  It was still dark outside, the window completely misted up with cold. I rolled over, sheets twisted around my body, and scooped my mobile off the bedside cabinet. It was Annabel.

  ‘Hey, sweetheart,’ I said, unravelling myself from the blankets. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Have you been online this morning?’

  I sat up. ‘It’s not even seven yet.’

  ‘I know,’ Annabel said. ‘But I think you should go to FeedMe.’

  FeedMe was the UK’s biggest online news site, a mix of serious reporting, influential campaigns and salacious gossip.

  ‘Why, what’s up?’

  ‘Do you ever read that “Crime and Punishment” blog they do?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Well, they’ve posted a story about you.’

  I felt my fatigue instantly drop away. ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know what it means,’ she said.

  ‘Crime and Punishment’ was a twice-weekly column written by an anonymous ex-copper. Despite the size of FeedMe, the column had existed in relative obscurity until a couple of years ago when it began reporting on a high-profile murder investigation, quoting sources inside the Met on things that all turned out to be true, and stealing a march on the national media in the process. I went through to the living room, grabbed my laptop off the table, and brought it back to bed, wedging the phone between my ear and shoulder.

  ‘You don’t know what it means?’ I said to Annabel, puzzled by her choice of words but then I clicked on the latest ‘Crime and Punishment’ column and found my answer in the last paragraph.

  And, finally, a weird story from the Met. Sources at Charing Cross tell me that a woman walked into the police station there early yesterday morning and told detectives that she’s been missing for eight years. The officer leading the investigation, DS Catherine Field, declined to comment, but I’m hearing the missing woman gave her name as Derryn Raker, the wife of investigator David Raker. Never heard of him? That’s because he keeps a deliberately low profile, but Raker has ended up front and centre – much to the chagrin of the police – of some of the biggest cases of recent years, including the hunt for the Body Snatcher, the disappearance of Met chief superintendent Leonard Franks and the baffling discovery of The Lost Man. Despite that, until now, Raker has managed to remain relatively unknown to the wider public, even while he continued to make enemies in police forces up and down the country. One Met detective I called said Raker was ‘an amateur and a liar’, and another labelled him as ‘a danger to himself and to the public’. Either way, I don’t imagine this latest twist in his story will help his cause much with the police or with the media: he told the world his wife had died of breast cancer in November 2009.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Annabel said.

  I didn’t reply as I tried to work out how this had got into the media so soon, and who might have put it there. Below the last paragraph was a picture of the woman, taken against a bland backdrop. Her eyes were wide, her skin pale. There was a look of mild confusion to her, her hair a mess, a coiled tangle of strands at her cheeks, framing an expression that seemed almost childlike. If the intention was to make her seem vulnerable, it had worked. If it was to get her noticed, that had worked as well.

  It was impossible to identify the location, but it could easily have been a police interview room. Could Field have put this story out into the wild? Could one of the officers she shared a station with? The woman at the front desk? The PC who’d stood guard as I’d watched the interview on the monitors? I reread the anonymous quotes from the Met detectives at the end of the article and realized it could have been anyone. There were things I loathed in the piece – suggestions I’d deliberately lied, that I’d sought cases out purely for the publicity they might bring – but it had hit on one, incontrovertible truth: there were plenty of people at the Met who knew me, hated me, and would take pleasure in feeding my name to the sharks in the media. A few journalists had tried to write about me before and had failed to get anything to stick. I’d managed to avoid the limelight then, deliberately so, despite the impact of my cases. But this felt different.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Annabel repeated.

  I’d almost forgotten she was on the line.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said decisively. ‘This woman’s mentally ill.’

  ‘You’ve met her?’

  ‘Yesterday. That’s why I had to come back to London.’

  ‘Why is she saying these things? Why is she saying she’s Derryn?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘The pictures you’ve shown me of Derryn …’ Annabel said hesitantly.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘She looks just like her.’

  ‘She doesn’t. Her mouth, her eyes, the way she holds herself – it’s not the same.’

  ‘But it’s close enough.’

  ‘I’ll call you back in a second,’ I said, and retreated to the living room. I’d left my notes out on the table the previous night, and somewhere among them was Field’s business card.

  She answered on the third ring.

  ‘CID.’

  ‘It’s David Raker. What’s going on?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘There’s a story in “Crime and Punishment” this morning.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Take a guess. So was it you?’

  ‘Was what me?’

  ‘Did you give them the story?’

  ‘No
,’ she said. ‘We haven’t put any information out.’

  ‘Well, if it’s not you, then it’s someone else at the Met – or it’s her.’

  ‘It’s 7 a.m., Mr Raker.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I’ve only been in work for ten minutes. I’ve barely got to my desk. Why don’t you calm down and give me an hour to take a look at the column and then I’ll have –’

  ‘This isn’t just another case to me. This is my life.’

  ‘I understand that.’

  ‘Do you? For the last couple of years I’d almost managed to find some sort of peace – and now my life is plastered all over the Internet.’

  ‘I can’t control the media, Mr Raker.’

  ‘She’s lying.’

  ‘Calm down.’

  ‘Everything’s a lie.’

  I thought of the previous night – the sound that had woken me, the heart on the window, the sign in the garage, and then what I thought I’d seen out on the path. Or hadn’t seen. Was it the woman who was lying to the cops, or was it me? Was I starting to imagine things now?

  I hung up and reread the article again. At best, I came out of this looking like I was confused, or sick. At worst, I was a con artist who’d invented a harrowing lie about a wife dying from cancer. And then there were the eight missing years mentioned in the article, something that the woman had already denied she’d ever said when quizzed by Field. She’d told Field she’d got lost, not that she was missing, but none of that mattered now. The eight years, the distortion of the truth, was out there, on the web, and now it would lead to obvious questions among readers. What if I was the reason she’d spent so long unaccounted for? What if I’d kept her locked up? As I thought of that, I thought of something else: was it possible that the woman had given FeedMe the story herself? Or maybe Erik McMillan had? Was this their attempt to now fully shift the narrative away from themselves and on to me? All it had taken was two hundred words on a website to create the idea of me as a suspect.

  I called Annabel back, hoping her voice might calm me, but she sounded upset and her sentences were clipped. Did she, like Field, mistrust me now? I’d only known my daughter for five years, our lives before that built on a deception that had deliberately kept us apart. It was hardly any time at all. She’d seen a version of me, but not all of me: I kept the worst of my work back from her because I didn’t want her to experience the effect it had on me, and because I vowed never to drag her into the orbit of my cases. So I had lied to her on occasion, or at least sidestepped the truth, but I’d always done it for what I thought were the right reasons. She didn’t need to hear about the bodies I’d found, or the killers I’d sat across the table from. She didn’t need to hear the truth about people: that sometimes there was no light in them at all. But maybe she was starting to remember those moments when I’d stopped short of telling her everything, when I’d hesitated. Maybe what I was telling her now about the woman felt like the times before when I’d stopped short of giving her the truth about my work.

  ‘I don’t think this woman was missing,’ I said to her. I tried to sound unequivocal.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I mean it, sweetheart. This woman …’ My words dropped away and I rubbed at my eyes, a distant thump starting to pound behind them. ‘This woman, she looks like Derryn and she does seem to know the things we did together … but it’s not her.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Just information,’ I replied, and then stopped before adding hesitantly, ‘and some other, private things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Dates, places we lived, things we shared.’

  ‘So she knows all that and she looks like her?’

  ‘It’s not Derryn.’

  ‘How can they look the same?’

  I closed my eyes, trying to seek solace in the darkness.

  ‘Why is she saying these things? What’s in it for her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I’m trying to find out.’

  Silence.

  ‘It’s the truth. You’re my daughter. I wouldn’t lie to you about this.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I trust you.’

  But there was a tremor in her voice as she said those last three words – and it made me wonder whether, this time, it wasn’t me who was lying.

  It was Annabel.

  18

  I made myself some breakfast, but couldn’t stomach it. Pushing my plate aside I went back to ‘Crime and Punishment’, reading it over and over again until it stopped meaning anything. The more times I read it, the angrier I got. I knew my anger was dangerous, something that would only get in the way, so I closed the browser and tried to douse my frustration.

  Think.

  Retrieving the prepaid mobile, I found the number for Hammond’s, the rental agency that Adam Reinsart used for the flat in Chalk Farm, and gave them a call. The woman who picked up put me on hold while she connected me to a guy called Gavin, who she said looked after the property. When she’d asked for my name, I said I was from the Met. Sooner or later, I knew all of this deceit would catch up with me – that someone, most likely a cop, would retrospectively connect the calls – but at the moment I hardly cared. Someone – maybe more than one person – was trying to destroy my life, and all I wanted now was the reason why. I needed to talk to the woman. I needed to talk to Erik McMillan. I needed to look them in the eyes. This was just one small step towards it.

  Gavin finally picked up. ‘Hello?’

  I went through exactly the same routine as the previous evening with Reinsart, and then asked, ‘So, there’s definitely no one living in the flat?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not until the 6th of January.’

  ‘Because we’ve got witnesses that say there is.’

  A confused pause.

  ‘Gavin?’

  ‘There shouldn’t be. Here at Hammond’s, we pride ourselves on –’

  ‘Would anyone else there know anything?’ I said, cutting off his sales pitch.

  ‘No. I handle that property.’ I could hear the shrill sound of phones in the background; voices. ‘If there’s been a break-in, I should probably go and take a look, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘No, it’s fine, sir,’ I said. ‘Leave it to us. You have two sets of keys at the office, is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I might need to come by at some point and pick a set up.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘That’s fine.’

  I thanked him and hung up.

  I looked at my notes, at the address for the flat, which I’d underlined a couple of times the previous night, and thought about paying the woman a visit. And then, almost instantly, I dismissed it. There were even more compelling reasons than yesterday not to go to Chalk Farm this morning. The FeedMe article was out there, people were looking at it, forming opinions about me, and Field had told me to steer clear of the woman. Being seen at the flat confronting her, the potential for raised voices, accusations, tears – none of it would help me if they thought I’d genuinely harmed the woman in some way.

  My phone burst into life.

  I looked at the unknown number on the display and tried to imagine what type of person would call me this early in the morning, during Christmas week. In the aftermath of the article there was really only one answer.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, picking up.

  ‘Mr Raker?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘It’s Connor McCaskell from the Daily –’

  I hung up.

  Shit.

  The media weren’t hanging around.

  Getting to my feet, I tried to clear my head, and then happened to glance along the hallway, in the direction of the bedrooms. Immediately, I thought of something.

  Derryn’s death certificate.

  I’d forgotten to get it the night before.

  The loft access was via a hatch halfway down the hallway. Reaching up, I grabbed the handle, flipped it down, and a three-section ladde
r began sliding out. I extended it, set it against the carpet and climbed up. The ladder creaked, its metal joints whining, and then the musty smell of the loft greeted me.

  The loft was about half the length of the house, and narrow: everything I’d put up here, I’d had to stack to one side in order to allow access. Most of the stuff was in boxes, my handwriting in black marker pen on the sides, the boxes all identical because I’d bought them in bulk and spent an entire weekend sorting everything into order. That had been about seven years ago – a year after Derryn had died – and had been the first time I’d felt strong enough to tackle what she’d left behind: her clothes, jewellery, keepsakes, photographs. There were tons of books too, all boxed up, as she’d been a massive reader, but she’d never wanted to give any of them away, so – during our marriage – the deal I’d managed to cut with her had always been that her least favourite novels stayed up here. The rest were on shelves in the spare room. I could have got rid of them after her death, or left them at the door of a charity shop somewhere, but the books – even the ones up here that she didn’t love as much – were a memory; a reminder of who she’d been.

  I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d left the death certificate, or any of the paperwork from the funeral, so I started going through the boxes one by one, lifting them off the stack and setting them down on the floor. I used my penknife to cut along their tops, through lines of packing tape that had become brittle over time. Under the stark glow of the loft’s only light bulb, I found clothes that still held the scent of her perfume, photos of her childhood, of her parents, of her brother in Iraq. I tried not to linger on any of them, not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t want to lose focus.

  It took a while but, eventually, I got to the one I was after, Important Docs written on the side. This was where I’d kept the death certificate, the receipts, the brochure from the cemetery where Derryn had chosen her plot. This was evidence in black and white that I’d lost her, laid her to rest, and that she really had been gone eight years. When I’d put them in here, I’d never wanted to see any of it again, to read it, to even touch it. Basically, I’d been burying it.