You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  ‘I don’t know anything about Gavin Roddat,’ I said. ‘I’d never heard of him until a couple of days ago, had never even met him in the flesh, and then all of a sudden he’s there on film with the woman, he’s trying to set me up, he’s breaking into my house and stealing videos of my wife and me. Is it possible he’s killed her? I don’t know – because I don’t have the first idea who he is or what he was up to.’

  ‘And you think he’s working with Erik McMillan?’

  ‘That would be my best guess.’

  ‘But McMillan has mysteriously disappeared too.’

  I could read between the lines: despite everything, they weren’t ready to abandon their suspicions about me. I still had over thirty hours I couldn’t account for and McMillan had vanished within that time frame. Somewhere in the blackness was the truth about him, I felt sure of that; about Roddat too, what connected them, and about who the woman was and what happened to her after she’d left my house – but as long as I couldn’t extract it, I had to accept the police’s mistrust. I’d never admit it to them, not on tape, but there was a part of me that still doubted my own judgement. I’d lost a day and a half and the only thing left among the wreckage was my time alone with the woman. A woman that no one could find now.

  I couldn’t have hurt her. Could I?

  ‘Okay, Mr Raker, thank you.’ I tuned back in as Carmichael reached across Field, switched off the tape and started to gather up his things. ‘I appreciate your honesty.’

  Thrown, I looked between them.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes, you’re free to go.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting here half the night, and you wrap things up in ten minutes?’ I looked between them again, trying to read their faces. Field wasn’t looking at me; Kent had a half-smile on his face, as if enjoying my confusion; and Carmichael barely seemed to be registering anything I was saying. That was when I realized I’d been wrong about him: I’d expected a fair crack of the whip, had maybe even held out some hope that he’d be open to an exchange of information – some of what I knew for some of what he and his team had gathered from the suicide. Instead, he was shutting me down. I looked to Field, her head still low, then back to Carmichael: ‘Seriously? That’s all?’

  ‘For now, yes.’

  ‘You made me wait around all night for that?’

  ‘You were free to go at any time.’

  I smiled, but there was no humour in it. Technically, he was right: they’d never placed me under arrest and had never read me my rights. But this had been more than just a voluntary attendance. I’d found the body. I’d called it in. Roddat had, for whatever reason, tried to ruin my life. Those were the reasons I’d spent nine hours here, with only my phone and machine coffee for company, and all four of us knew it.

  ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ I said to Carmichael.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I want to know what you’re keeping back.’

  ‘Don’t be paranoid, Mr Raker,’ Carmichael said, buzzing the door open, and looking back at me. Field and Kent got to their feet, neither of them making eye contact, and moved past him, into the corridor. ‘This is an active police investigation,’ Carmichael continued, ‘not some question and answer session at the town hall, so whatever it is you think we’re keeping back, and whatever you want answers to, it’s going to have to wait. If you want my advice, Mr Raker, I’d go home. We’ll call you if we need you – but I think it’s highly unlikely.’

  I went to reply, but he was already gone.

  46

  I left the station exactly the same way I’d arrived: in the dark. The city was quiet, there was rain in the air, and I was no closer to understanding why Gavin Roddat had killed himself, why he’d broken into my home, or why he’d stolen the home movies from me. Had he taken Derryn’s death certificate? Was he the one who gave her the book? Was he the face I thought I saw out on the path behind my house and the one who drew a heart on my bedroom window? And where was the woman in all of this?

  Could she really be dead?

  It didn’t help that I was angry now too. I’d sat there for nine hours waiting for answers, and I’d come away with nothing. What I couldn’t decide was if Carmichael was laying down the prelude to some carefully constructed strategy, or if this had simply been a joke at my expense, a stunt, a way to belittle and frustrate me, and keep me away from – and uninformed about – about the investigation.

  It started to rain properly as I approached the Tube, a sudden eruption from the black sky, but I was so deep in thought, I barely registered it. I barely registered the vibration of my phone in my pocket either, the chirp of a text message pinging through, not until I was down on the platform and it chirped a second time. I got out my mobile and checked the screen.

  I know what the police aren’t telling you.

  Salmon Bridge railway arches. 15 minutes.

  The number was listed as PRIVATE.

  I looked around me, automatically, instinctively, as if the message had been a whisper from somewhere close by. There was a group of teenagers further down the platform, some of them clearly still drunk from the night before, but no one else.

  I reread the message. I know what the police aren’t telling you. A warning went off at the back of my skull as I thought of finding Gavin Roddat’s body at the house; of the woman being manoeuvred away from the flat; of Erik McMillan. All the questions I had, all the frustrations of the last nine hours – and, suddenly, a text lands out of the blue.

  It was a trap. It had to be.

  I headed back up to street level, going to the maps on my phone. I had no idea where Salmon Bridge was, but it didn’t take me long to find it: it crossed the line out of Kentish Town train station about half a mile away. The arches were built under it on a road that ran adjacent to the tracks.

  I had ten minutes to get there – if I was going. Taking in the street, I watched as the rain got heavier, crackling against the pavements, the clouds so dark it was like the middle of the night. I tried to think straight, tried to imagine where this might end up, who I was meeting and why they’d try to get me alone. The risks didn’t require imagination. There were countless reasons not to go because there were always countless reasons not to walk into a meeting totally blind. But what would happen if I didn’t go?

  Maybe nothing.

  Maybe everything.

  I took off, heading east, as light finally began to break in the distance. Soon, the railway lines emerged to my left and then I arrived at the bridge itself. It rose slightly as it straddled the line, and on the other side some steps led down to the road that the arches were on. From my position at the top, I couldn’t see much more than the first few, fenced off and filled with shadows. The rain was coming down so hard now, it made it difficult to see even that much.

  I took the stairs down.

  There were ten arches in total: a couple had been turned into businesses; the rest had been fenced off to prevent them being used as shelters and drug dens. The fences had been breached or broken in two of them: one was closest to me; the other was much further along. I used the torch on my phone to illuminate the interior of the one opposite: it had been used as a dump, the ground awash in old machinery, tyres, bottles, cans and food. The whole thing smelt of urine.

  No one was waiting for me there.

  I looked along the other arches, formed like a row of open mouths, all of them full of nothing but the darkness of early morning. But then, inside the seventh one, I saw something. It took me a moment to realize what: cigarette smoke. It drifted from the shadows before being instantly doused by the rain.

  My heart started beating a little faster.

  Slower this time, I headed in the direction of the archway, angling my head in an effort to see who was waiting. There wasn’t enough natural light down here, though, no street lamps nearby, and the rain was falling too thickly.

  But then I started to see more clearly.

  Twenty feet sho
rt of the archway, I spotted a hand in the dark – a cigarette pinched between two fingers – and the edges of a figure. The figure took another long drag on the cigarette and then flicked it out into the street.

  ‘You’re late,’ a voice said from the darkness.

  #0734

  No. No, wait. No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean those things.

  I don’t want to hurt you, Derryn.

  I should never have said that.

  If you were ever at home, we could have straightened this out a long time ago, I wouldn’t have become so frustrated and there wouldn’t have been any grey areas. I mean, I would have been honest with you. I would have said to you, ‘It’s been eating me up, Derryn, the way you didn’t seem to appreciate the gift I gave you; the way you reacted when I told you I loved The Man with the Wolf’s Head, that it was my favourite Eva Gainridge book, not No One Can See the Crows at Night.’ It felt like you believed my choice was conventional and predictable – less worthy than yours – and that hurt me.

  That’s why I ended up saying those stupid things.

  If I could just see you again, I’m sure I would put your mind at rest very quickly. I really believe that. I’ve been over it again and again in my head. I’d tell you, ‘It’s okay, I’m not angry with you any more, I just want you to apologize for the way you treated me.’ And, after that, you’d realize what a bitch you’ve been and you’d say sorry to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ you’d say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I’d tell you, ‘It’s fine, it’s all forgotten. You’re forgiven, Derryn.’

  And then you’d invite me in, and we’d maybe have coffee together, and I’d make you smile and laugh, and then – over time – we would start to grow closer; you’d confide in me, and me in you, and we’d go to dinner – just like I’ve always wanted – and talk about books and art and the places in the world we’d always wanted to see. And then, eventually, at a time when we felt completely comfortable with one another, we’d make love, and it would be wonderful, and it would really mean something, and afterwards we’d lie beside one another, beneath crisp white sheets, and you’d feel so at ease with me, so close to me, that you’d tell me a secret, something you’ve never told anyone else, ever – and I’d tell you one in return. And it would be the one about why I love The Man with the Wolf’s Head so much more than any of Eva Gainridge’s other novels. More than any book I’ve ever read. I would tell you what I’ve never admitted to anyone else in my entire life, Derryn, and it’s this: I honestly, genuinely believe that book was written for me.

  I know how that comes across. I know you probably think I sound crazy at this point, but it’s true.

  See, the main character, Oliver, he’s like me: he looks like me, he’s about the same age as I am, he thinks like I do and says the same sort of things; he had his heart broken by the callous actions of a woman, a slut, a whore, and he meekly accepted what Maisie did to him, just like I did with Nora. I let the woman I loved and the man that she was screwing get away with it, and so did Oliver. And afterwards, it played on my mind constantly, just the same as it did with Oliver in the book, and neither of us could let it go. We were the same. It ate away at us, him and I; it burned us, it made us so angry, all the time, with everything. And although, subsequently, we both met other people – he met Roberta, you’ll remember; and I met you – that anger, it never really goes away, it just gets buried under a thin covering of earth. And, because of that, sometimes it resurfaces, and I become like my father. And sometimes it comes back even worse than that. Sometimes it just hits me so suddenly and violently that I can’t control the frustration and the anger, which is exactly what happened to Oliver in the book.

  I mean, you know how the next bit goes.

  You might not know my story yet – not fully – but you know Oliver’s. You’ve read the novel. After she cheated on him, you know what he did to Maisie.

  He punished her, and he silenced her.

  Because, in the end, that’s all a liar deserves.

  47

  Field looked out at me from the darkness of the railway arch.

  ‘You sent me the message?’ I was completely thrown. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  She didn’t respond. Instead, she turned and headed into the black of the tunnel. I followed her, reluctantly at first, drizzle trailing us as we moved through the shadows. Beneath my feet I listened to the crunch of broken glass, I brushed the edges of mattresses with the toes of my boots, and smelt old water and older sweat. There was no one else here, I could tell that much, but there had been recently. They’d been sleeping rough, their clothes still strewn everywhere, empty wine bottles on the ground.

  We stopped.

  Field turned to face me. It was harder to see her than it had been at the edge of the arch, but there was enough light for us not to be in total blackness. She was wearing a dark, knee-length raincoat and she’d put her hair back, but that was the only change I could see from the interview room.

  ‘Did you speak to anyone about meeting me here?’ she said.

  ‘How could I do that when I didn’t even know it was you that I was meeting?’ I looked both ways and then back at Field: ‘Why did you send me that text?’

  ‘I’ve got thirty minutes before I have to be back,’ she said, ‘so do me a favour and don’t interrupt unless you have to. Can I trust you to keep this between us?’

  ‘I don’t even know what “this” is.’

  ‘Yes or no? Can I trust you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and watched her, wondering if I could do the same with her.

  ‘If you sell me down the river, I’ll burn your life to the ground.’ She stared hard at me, her eyes dark, slightly narrowed, perhaps looking for the hint of a man who might betray her. But then she must have seen enough, because she said, ‘I’m going to tell you some things. And part of the agreement you automatically make with me when I do that is that you never, ever call or contact me about anything. Never. When I call you next, for whatever reason this investigation determines we need to talk, you’re going to pretend we never spoke. Because – as far as the Met knows – we never did. Do you understand me, Raker?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because I promise you I will –’

  ‘I get it, Field,’ I said.

  She was quiet for a moment, her eyes still fixed on mine, and then, her voice soft, so slight it was like an echo from the rainstorm, she said, ‘Carmichael’s a DI, so he’s a ranking officer, and everything big in this case has happened on his patch, not ours. The flat that woman was taken from is half a mile down the road from here; Roddat’s body turned up in a house in Camden …’ She faded out, then fumbled around in her pocket and removed her cigarettes. ‘Carmichael has a dead body and what looks like a kidnapping – or, who knows, maybe even a murder now; we can’t find the woman anywhere – and Kent and I have her disappearance, McMillan’s vanishing act, and you. So, for the time being, it’s Carmichael’s show. He’s the tip of the spear now and he can play it exactly how he likes. And how he likes it played is you out of the loop, because he’s heard all about you from his drinking partners at the Met, he doesn’t trust you, and he thinks you’re lying through your teeth.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About everything.’

  ‘And you don’t?’

  She thumbed a cigarette out of its carton, pinched it between her front teeth and used a Zippo to light it. Her eyes didn’t leave mine as she inhaled, blowing the smoke off to her left, where it vanished instantly. ‘I’m not sure about you, Raker,’ she said. ‘That’s the truth. I’ve read about you too. Some of the shit you’ve pulled, it doesn’t sit well with me. But there are things in this case that are sitting even less well with me.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She watched me. ‘You said this Roddat guy never appeared on your radar before last night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘I chatted to him once on the phone a few days ago about the flat, but th
e call lasted less than a minute.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it,’ I insisted.

  She nodded. ‘So, this guy barely registers as a blip, but it appears that he’s obsessed with you and your wife. I mean, in a search of his house last night, Carmichael’s team found fourteen home videos he must have stolen from you and digitally transferred, all saved on a hard drive – that’s about twenty-one hours of film. They found editing software on a second laptop that he used to capture very precise screenshots of you both: he had literally hundreds of printouts of you and your wife in a locked container under his bed, and thousands of shots saved to his laptop. Every angle you can possibly imagine. It was like he sat in front of those videos screenshotting the bloody things frame by frame.’

  I couldn’t imagine why Field was telling me all of this, but I had even less idea why Roddat would go to those lengths. Why would he steal those movies from me? Why would he sit in front of them and capture them all? Why was he so infatuated with Derryn and me? Immediately, an idea started to form. Was this the fallout from an old case? Had I crossed paths with Roddat before? While it wasn’t impossible, it seemed unlikely: I’d barely started working with missing people by the time Derryn died. I’d closed five, maybe six, cases by then, and none of them had been like this. They hadn’t been like the major ones mentioned in the FeedMe article either.

  This wasn’t to do with an old missing persons case.

  The alternative was that it had something to do with my time as a journalist – a story I’d written, a piece that had exposed people, the unravelling of corruption, greed, crime. But, again, I just couldn’t see the connection, couldn’t imagine which of those stories might have had this type of ripple effect.

  ‘They found the death certificate.’

  I looked at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Derryn’s death certificate,’ Field repeated.

  ‘Roddat had it?’