You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  ‘I think you’ll want to hear this.’

  He sounded sombre, severe. I stopped packing.

  ‘What’s up?’ I said.

  ‘We might have a problem.’

  ‘What sort of problem?’

  ‘After I got off the trawler yesterday, I arrived home and found this guy waiting outside the cottage. He said he was from the Tribune.’

  Shit. The UK’s biggest daily.

  ‘He left his card. Connor McCaskell.’

  I recognized the name instantly: he’d tried calling me three days ago, a few hours after the FeedMe article had been posted, and I’d hung up.

  ‘Raker?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m here.’

  I rubbed at my forehead. I didn’t need this now.

  ‘Why’s some arsehole hack turning up on my doorstep?’

  ‘Because someone at the Met screwed up,’ I said.

  Field had no idea of the harm she’d done when she’d leaked the story to FeedMe. Maybe she really had done it for the right reasons, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with. Not only had she invited the entire media into my life, exposed me to them, put my work and my choices under completely avoidable scrutiny, she’d sent ripples even further out. Kennedy was the biggest and most damaging secret of all. If anyone found out about him, he was going to prison, and I was going with him.

  ‘What did he say to you?’ I asked.

  ‘He knew you owned the cottage, but didn’t realize it was being rented. He asked what my name was.’

  ‘Did you tell him?’

  ‘I told him I didn’t speak to journalists.’

  It was hard to say if that was better or worse than him just giving McCaskell a name. We were always going to be vulnerable, whatever direction Kennedy went in.

  ‘You need to leave,’ I said, trying to think fast.

  ‘And go where?’

  ‘Anywhere. Just grab your things, go to Totnes, get on a train and head north. I’ve got a credit card I only use in emergencies. I’ll give you the details. Get a hotel and lie low.’

  ‘He said he was writing a story about you.’

  My stomach dropped again.

  ‘He wanted to know if I knew anything about the woman who says she’s your wife.’ Kennedy sighed. ‘What the fuck have you got yourself into, Raker?’

  ‘I’ll explain everything later.’

  He was silent.

  ‘Just get out of there, okay?’

  Again, he didn’t respond.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Take your passport as well. Just in case.’

  ‘Am I going abroad too?’

  ‘You’re going wherever no one can find you.’

  ‘Why is this woman pretending to be your wife?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, heading off any other conversation he might be about to start. I told him to get going and call me when he was safe, and then zipped up the bag and carried it through to the living room.

  The home movies were still scattered across the floor.

  I thought of Derryn, of the places I’d captured her in, of how she would have looked at the time – and then my mind changed direction entirely and I thought of another video I’d watched, much more recently: the CCTV footage from Chalk Farm.

  That was the only direct connection I had to the woman now.

  The four movie files from that night that I had on my laptop, that I’d watched over and over again already, remained the single, most powerful snapshot of her – and of Gavin Roddat – that I had in my possession.

  I had to make them count.

  52

  I was back in Plumstead forty-five minutes before the library opened, so found a café and loaded up on some much-needed coffee. The sun had come out, it was cool but bright, frost sprinkled across the Common, and in a window seat overlooking it, I got out my MacBook, plugged in my headphones and opened the Chalk Farm CCTV footage.

  Fast-forwarding it to the point when Roddat first emerged from the dark, I hit Pause, inching it through frame by frame from there. I wanted to try and see if I could spot something else – anything – that might provide me with a glimpse of an answer, a connection between him and Derryn, the woman and Derryn, between any of this. Instead, it played out exactly the same as it had every other time: he came into view at 6.31 p.m., and vanished into the stairwell.

  I moved it on almost an hour, to the point at which the woman appeared in frame for the very first time, at 7.26 p.m. I let her come into shot, stop there, look up to the fifth floor, and then I hit the space bar, freezing it on the best angle I had of her.

  Who are you?

  I watched her for a moment more, frozen within the confines of the laptop’s screen, and then started up the film again as she vanished into the stairwell.

  Look again.

  I rewound it, back to the moments before and after the woman turned up at the flat. I watched people come and go in the minutes either side, and watched her come into frame, pause there with the Post-it note in hand, and glance towards the flat.

  Were you nervous about meeting him?

  I thought of her expression as she’d exited the flat afterwards. Something had happened up there, beyond Roddat hurting her physically. The bruise she now carried, the fresh cut, the specks of blood she’d left on the door frame – it wasn’t any of that. It was something else.

  What did Roddat say to you?

  I went through all of it again, all the way up until she and Roddat left, then did the same on repeat. After yet another run-through, I stopped, leaning back in my chair. My body felt tight, rigid and uncomfortable from leaning over the laptop for so long. I stretched, finished my latest cup of coffee, and looked at the frozen image of the woman emerging from the stairwell. What was I doing?

  This was madness.

  I ordered another coffee, felt it make no impact, and bumped on the footage a couple of frames until both the woman and Roddat were visible.

  It’s not madness. There’s something here.

  There was no denying what the police had found in Roddat’s possession – the photos, the videos, the death certificate – and I couldn’t argue against the idea of him killing himself, because Field was right: it was so hard to dress a murder up as a suicide – or, at least, it was easy enough to dress it up at the scene, but almost impossible to sustain it once forensics and a pathologist became involved. Roddat had killed himself, that much was certain, and he had hurt the woman during the hour they’d spent inside the flat. But there was something else.

  Something I wasn’t seeing yet.

  I went all the way back again and tapped at the cursor keys to edge the footage on. I watched the same faces come and go – a young couple; an old woman, slow, limping, being helped by what must have been her son – and saw the same cars pulling into the same parking spaces. Teenagers drifted out of the shadows beneath the flats once more and out beyond the side of the frame, and then all was quiet again. The clock ticked on, and then – when the readout got to 8.33 p.m. – the woman finally emerged, Roddat behind her.

  I hit Pause.

  Wait a second …

  Rewinding the footage all the way back, I started it again at the point the young couple came into shot. As soon as they did, I paused it, studying their faces, remembering what Field had said to me at the arches: We’ve managed to identify most of the people who appeared on film before and after Roddat entered the stairwell, and again when he came back down with her, and we’ve spoken to all of them but one.

  I looked at the screen again.

  All of them but one.

  I moved the video past the couple and on to the old woman and her son. This time I stopped it at the best angle I had of them. It was easy to see her: she was in her late eighties, slightly crooked, her limp pronounced. Her face was caught under the full glare of a street lamp. Next to her, though, I could see hardly anything of her son. A line of shadows bisected the two of them, sh
e as bright as he was dark. His face was mostly covered.

  After they disappeared from view, I replayed the section over again, slowing it down once the two of them came out of the stairwell.

  And then it hit me like a punch to the throat.

  As soon as they appeared in shot, the son said something to his mother, and she came to a halt and looked back at him. She responded, although I couldn’t see her lips, just the movement of her jaw. There was a momentary lull before she broke out into a smile. After that, he took her gently by the elbow, saying something else to her, and the two of them went right.

  I rewound it and stopped it just as they first appeared in the stairwell.

  She doesn’t know he’s there.

  That was what I was missing on the video, the speck of grime on an otherwise featureless canvas. Him. The son was what was wrong with it. When he appeared in the stairwell behind her, when she stopped and looked back at him, she didn’t know he was there.

  Because he isn’t her son.

  He wasn’t even someone she knew.

  He was a total stranger.

  Field had said there was one potential eyewitness at the flats that night whom the police hadn’t been able to speak to yet.

  This was the one they couldn’t find.

  I rewound the section and played it again.

  At the bottom of the stairwell, when he first spoke to the old woman – when he presumably asked if he could help her, take her arm, walk her out – she stopped and looked back because she was surprised, and she was suspicious.

  Until then, she hadn’t seen or heard him at all.

  After that, he must have worked fast, made her feel at ease; told her he would help her, accompany her to wherever she was going. Maybe, if she was still suspicious of his intentions, he’d made up a story on the spot: he lived close to her, or he knew her family or a friend of hers; or maybe he’d played on her age, the way memories became cloudier over time, and pretended they’d talked before. It was impossible to tell on the video, and impossible to know for sure, but however he’d accomplished it – however he had got her onside – it had worked, because the next moment, she’d let him take her by the elbow and the two of them walked out of shot. He’d hidden behind the fiction he’d created – the mother and son – and let the shadows do the rest. Because no one was going to look twice at a son helping an elderly parent.

  Field must have seen this too, and she – or one of her team – would have talked to the old woman about it; in turn, the woman would surely have confirmed the guy wasn’t her son. If the police couldn’t find this person, they couldn’t interview him, which was why they had one outstanding witness.

  That wasn’t what bothered me, though.

  What bothered me was the fact that Field hadn’t said anything about the son when we’d been at the arches, about suspicions she might have had, just that there was a potential witness they hadn’t located yet. So why would she keep that information back? The more I thought about it, the more I could only think of two possible reasons.

  Either Field genuinely didn’t think it was important.

  Or she’d chosen to lie.

  53

  The door to the library was propped open by a couple of bricks. Beyond, there was a short hallway leading directly to a staircase. I entered and headed up.

  It was a former flat, so at the top I found a landing with a toilet in the middle and two doors either side: one into what used to be a kitchen-diner, one into the former bedroom. All the furniture had been removed, replaced by wall-to-ceiling bookcases.

  In the kitchen, at the counter, there was a man in his fifties, lean and sinewy, with the beginnings of a grey beard. He sat on a stool, leaning on the worktop, his head in a biography of the film star Glen Cramer.

  He looked up and said, ‘Hello there.’

  ‘Hi. My name’s David Raker.’ I handed my card to him. ‘I’m trying to find someone who might have come in here.’

  He looked at the card. ‘ “Missing persons investigator”. Wow. Well, that’s a bit more exciting than this.’ He snapped his book shut. ‘I’m Roy.’

  We shook hands.

  ‘Welcome to the Plumstead Common Community Library,’ he said, his accent local. ‘Have you ever been here before?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘We’ve been open fifteen years in February,’ he said proudly, gesturing to the room. I followed his eyes across the bookshelves, paperbacks and encyclopedias, annuals and graphic novels crammed into every available space. ‘We’ve been very fortunate,’ he went on. ‘We got a grant the first year, which got us up and running, then the former landlord decided to waive the second year’s rates and offered us the tenancy rent-free. This was his first flat – plus, he’s a big campaigner for children’s literacy.’

  I placed my notebook down on the kitchen counter and got out a pen. ‘The owner of this place,’ I said, ‘would it be possible to get a name?’

  ‘Carl Goshen.’

  It rang a bell.

  ‘He does something with the Internet,’ Roy went on, waving a hand airily around his head, and as soon as he told me that, it clicked: Goshen had founded a video-based social media platform in the late 2000s, had sold it for billions, and now worked in California at a second company he’d set up. It seemed unlikely he would be a route to anything, least of all answers in this case.

  I looked around the shelves briefly, eyes on the spines, trying to see if I could spot any of Eva Gainridge’s novels. But there were so many books, stacked vertically and horizontally, I couldn’t tell for sure.

  Slipping my bag off my shoulders, I unzipped it and grabbed the printouts I’d made of the woman and Gavin Roddat.

  ‘Do you recognize this man?’

  He took the printout from me. I’d decided to show him Roddat first because the picture was clearer, more defined, and might get me further, faster.

  As I waited, I looked around the room again. Above one of the shelves, taped to the wall, was a handwritten sign: The books in this room are all for sale – most are £3 or less! If you only wish to borrow, head across the landing.

  ‘No.’

  I looked at Roy. ‘You don’t recognize him? He hasn’t ever come in here?’

  He held up the photo of Roddat again. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, studying it. ‘He certainly doesn’t seem familiar.’

  ‘Is it just you who works here?’

  ‘It is, yeah.’

  So there was no chance anyone else might come up with a different response. I swapped pictures. ‘What about her?’

  Roy took the printout of the woman from me. It was much fuzzier than the one of Roddat, especially blown up. The original picture that had been sent to FeedMe had been small and low resolution – I imagined because, at that stage, as she sent the woman’s image out into the wild, Field was still trying to contain the spread of the story, even as she attempted to use the media as a tool to advance it. That decision may have seemed minor to her, but its reverberations were huge. If she’d taken a decent image of the woman, a clearer one, I might not have spent four days petrified that I was ill; I might not have had journalists picking apart my life, my own daughter uncertain about whether I was telling the truth.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Roy said finally.

  It was better than the blanket no he’d given me for Roddat.

  ‘Have you got a better image of her?’ he asked.

  ‘No, that’s it,’ I said, frustrated. Field had had images of the woman on her phone, taken through the wrinkled plastic of evidence bags at Gavin Roddat’s house. Why hadn’t I asked her for one of those?

  But then I thought of something.

  I went to my mobile, punched in the code and then paused again. Roddat had the death certificate in his house. You’re not sick. You know that now. She’s not Derryn.

  They’re not the same person.

  I repeated it all to myself again, and then again, a third time, a fourth, and then I went to my photograph
s and scrolled to the top where I had some pictures I’d moved across from previous handsets. I tapped on one of them.

  ‘She looks a bit like this,’ I said.

  It was a photo of Derryn the February before she’d died. It was a Sunday. I remembered it clearly, could almost see the image moving in front of my eyes. It had snowed, and we’d been out on Ealing Common, carving trails with our feet, watching kids building snowmen, and then we’d ended up at a café. She’d tried an eggnog latte and had almost gagged drinking it, and after that it had become a running joke between us every time we went for a coffee.

  Roy took my phone from me.

  The woman isn’t Derryn.

  The woman isn’t –

  ‘Oh, that’s Derryn,’ he said.

  I swallowed. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s Derryn. She used to come in here all the time.’

  54

  It felt like my throat had closed.

  I looked at the phone, at the picture of my wife – stopped in time on a snowy day almost nine years ago – and then back to Roy.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

  ‘How do you know her name’s Derryn?’

  I sounded exactly what I was: rattled, shaken, unnerved.

  He shrugged. ‘Because she told me.’

  I took a moment, gathering myself.

  Which Derryn did Roy mean?

  Mine? Or the impostor?

  He handed the phone back, sensing something was off with me, but I avoided his stare and looked out to the books. Breathe. Concentrate. On one of the shelves closest to me was a sci-fi novel with an illustration of a skyscraper on it, a maze of trees in semicircles at its apex, three people – just dots compared to the trees – lost at the centre. As I studied the image, it reminded me of the design on the clock I had hanging in the living room, the spirals of the triskelion, and the way the clock had shown a different date during the hours when I’d been alone with the woman in my house. The thought of her – of those moments when I’d given in, closed my eyes and pretended it was Derryn – made something inside me cramp.

  What if it had been Derryn?

  I rejected the question the moment it formed. Roddat had Derryn’s death certificate in his house. McMillan had lied about treating me and now he’d gone to ground. The man on the CCTV footage was still out there, and he was a part of this just the same as the other two. And then there was the woman herself.