You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  He wheezed, looked at me, his eyelids fluttering.

  I grabbed my phone, trying to second-guess the fallout for me from dialling 999. But I didn’t really have a choice. McMillan was dying. He needed an ambulance. If I tried to save my own skin, I was condemning someone else.

  As I was speaking to an operator, I looked around the room. On the bed, half-covered by sheets, was a knife. It was small, but it was sharp and serrated, probably taken from the kitchen. McMillan must have been sleeping with it under his pillow.

  I put the rest together: his attacker had come to the house with his own knife – judging by McMillan’s wounds, a proper hunting knife – and stabbed McMillan just under the ribcage. It was bad. As he started coughing, blood escaping on to his lips, I started to realize how bad. The injury was making a sucking sound. Every time he breathed in, air was escaping into his chest cavity. If his attacker had been able to run for a boat, his injury was nowhere near as bad as McMillan’s, but it was bad enough: bad enough that he would try to patch it up in the bathroom. And, as he was doing that, he must have seen me from one of the windows, approaching.

  He’d climbed up, on to one of the cross-beams.

  And he’d waited.

  I finished calling for an ambulance, pocketed my phone and looked at McMillan’s wound again. He stared back at me wordlessly. He was a doctor: he knew better than I did.

  He didn’t have long.

  Hurrying through to the kitchen, I searched around for some cling film, grabbed the tape his attacker had been using in the bathroom, and returned to McMillan. Lifting up his shirt, exposing the wound, I tried to create a makeshift dressing, laying a folded sheet of cling film over the injury and taping it to his skin on all four sides.

  When I was done, he looked at me, blinked as if he couldn’t focus, and softly said, ‘Thank you,’ but we both knew it was only a temporary fix. If the ambulance didn’t get here in the next ten minutes, he wasn’t leaving this cottage alive.

  ‘Erik, I need you to focus, okay?’

  He tried to shift himself, and grimaced.

  ‘Where’s Melody?’

  I wasn’t sure if he’d even heard me.

  ‘Erik.’ I took a step closer to him, his blood tacky against the underside of my shoes. His eyes started to close. I knelt down beside the chair, laid a hand on his arm and said, ‘Erik, listen to me. Where’s Melody Campbell?’

  ‘She’s …’

  ‘She’s where?’ I squeezed his arm. ‘Where is she, Erik?’

  ‘She’s gone.’

  Panic hit my bloodstream.

  ‘She’s dead?’

  He didn’t respond. My memory fired up: the woman sitting in an interview room at Charing Cross; approaching the flat at Chalk Farm; in the living room at my house; in my arms for those few short minutes.

  ‘Melody’s dead?’

  ‘He got rid of her,’ he murmured, staring off into space.

  ‘He? You mean the man who was here?’

  He nodded slowly.

  I took a breath, collecting myself. ‘Who is he? What’s his name?’

  ‘John.’

  ‘John who?’

  ‘I don’t …’ He faded out. ‘I don’t know.’

  He winced, jamming a hand to the dressing I’d made.

  ‘I don’t know anything about him,’ he breathed, about him barely making it past his lips.

  I looked around the room, as if the answers might be hidden in its corners, but then – when I turned back to McMillan – it hit me properly: Melody was dead. I was never going to find out why she’d pretended to be Derryn.

  They were both gone.

  ‘Do you know where Melody’s body is?’

  He looked at me, his eyes filling with tears. One broke free and he tried to wipe it away, his hand juddering towards his face. All he did was smear fresh blood across his cheek.

  ‘My letter,’ he said, almost incoherent now.

  ‘What?’

  He began weeping again.

  ‘Where can I find Melody’s body, Erik?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You treated her, right? I found your notes in the mailbox in Earls Court. You treated her. You must know something about her.’

  He glanced down at himself, at the wound, at the blood slowly spreading like an oil slick beneath the cling film. ‘I’m dying,’ he said quietly, his words slurred, gluey. ‘This is …’ He sucked in another breath. ‘This is the ending I deserve.’

  ‘What about Melody, Erik? I need to find her.’

  He returned his gaze to me, his focus drifting in and out, like a camera struggling to adjust. ‘I’m sorry for what I did.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I lied … about you.’

  We stared at each other.

  ‘You were …’ He swallowed. ‘Never my patient.’

  ‘So why did you say that I was?’

  He answered but I didn’t hear him, his throat wet, the words doughy and indistinct. I leaned in closer to him and asked him the same question again.

  ‘Scared,’ he mumbled.

  ‘That’s why you said you treated me?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Who were you scared of?’

  His eyelids began to droop.

  ‘Were you scared of this John guy?’

  Another nod of the head.

  ‘He said … he’d tell … everyone.’

  I frowned. ‘Tell everyone about what?’

  He started coughing again.

  ‘Tell everyone about what, Erik?’

  He was starting to drift again.

  ‘Erik.’

  He looked up at me, disorientated, and then – as he glanced at the wound, like a mouth beneath his ribcage – he started whimpering.

  ‘Erik. Where’s Melody Campbell?’

  ‘My letter,’ he said again.

  ‘What letter? What are you talking about?’

  He shifted his head slightly and looked across the room, towards the bed. I followed his eyeline. All I could see were bloodstained sheets. The knife. Some books on the bedside cabinet. A pen.

  A spiral notepad.

  I grabbed it but it was empty. He’d used pages in it – I could see the thin slivers of paper caught in the spirals at the top – but there was nothing written inside. All its pages were blank. I looked back at him, confused, and saw that his eyes were on the top drawer of the bedside cabinet.

  I opened it up.

  There were two solitary sheets of paper, torn from the notepad, sitting on top of some underwear. He’d written on both of them, front and back, and not in the deliberately illegible hand he’d used when he’d been writing about Melody. He wanted the recipient to be able to read this.

  Because the recipient was his daughter.

  He was asking Caitlin to forgive him.

  66

  I finished reading the letter and looked across the room at McMillan. He stared back, tears in his eyes. He’d managed to gather himself slightly but the pain was still humming close to the surface. His mouth was permanently turned up at the edges, as if he couldn’t breathe properly.

  ‘You really want your daughter to see this?’ I said to him, floored by what I’d read. He nodded. ‘This will destroy her, Erik.’

  He nodded again.

  ‘She idolizes you.’

  There was a flicker of something in his face this time, and then a spark of uncertainty flared. It was clear that he’d been going back and forward on this, and not just over the last few days – over months, years. He’d wanted to tell his daughter the truth for a long time, about the things he’d done, about his wife, Kelly. It had been eating him up. But he loved Caitlin more than anything in the world, and he’d realized the truth would devastate her. It would ravage their relationship.

  There would be no going back.

  I looked at the letter again. These words, this truth, was how it was possible to manipulate him. This was why he’d gone along with the lies of Melody Campbe
ll, of the killer I’d chased to the boat. This was how McMillan had been blackmailed.

  Dear Caitlin …

  He started by saying how much he loved her, that she was the centre and circumference of his life. He said nothing could, or ever would, change that, but he needed to tell her something. She needed to know the truth about her mother, about why Kelly ran a bath ten years ago, and cut her wrists.

  I looked up at him.

  He was crying, grieving. He was bleeding from the wound in his chest, and he was dying. But the decay had started a long time before tonight.

  Your mum had been depressed for years …

  It had been pretty much since the start of their marriage. But they’d managed it – with pills, with therapy, Kelly had managed to survive, to maintain an equilibrium, and Caitlin had been a big part of that. Their daughter had been their light, the tether that bound them all together, the perpetual life jacket that had kept Kelly afloat. Except, a rot had been festering the whole time: Erik McMillan had a secret.

  I wanted to tell your mum from early on, even before you were born, but I’m not sure I was certain then. Or maybe I was just frightened about how people would react to me, what they might say about me. I felt like I couldn’t give into it.

  But then he met Bruce Dartford.

  And that was when he stopped denying who he was.

  Kelly had found emails between the two of them on McMillan’s computer. An accident – she hadn’t been prying. But, low at the time, in a funk, it sent her even lower. Three weeks passed and she didn’t get out of bed. Caitlin asked her dad what was wrong with Mum and he told her it was just another period of decline, a trough that her mum would crawl out of, just the same as before. Erik assured her that he had no idea why it had suddenly hit her so hard like this.

  A day later, Kelly was dead.

  I looked across the room at him.

  If I could help it, I rarely opted for lies, especially among family. But, even though I didn’t know Caitlin, except through a single ten-minute call, I could see how huge this would be. Everything would fall, because she’d built everything on following the example of her father: how he’d tried to help her mother; how he helped patients at the hospital; how people respected him and looked up to him; how he loved them both, mother and daughter, and supported them – Caitlin especially, but even Kelly, however platonic his real feelings for her had been.

  If the truth was just that he was gay, Caitlin might be shocked, but she would probably accept that over time. But the issue wasn’t McMillan’s sexuality, it wasn’t even necessarily the way he’d kept it secret, it was the way his wife had found out, the things she had read in the emails between him and Bruce Dartford, and the aftermath. She cut her wrists because he had an affair, because that affair was with a man, because he didn’t love her as a husband was supposed to love a wife, and because he’d lied to her about who he was for the entirety of their marriage.

  ‘You really want Caitlin to read this?’ I said again.

  He was definitely unsure now. Eventually, things were going to come out, his deception about me would be exposed, but there were degrees of severity. How he’d deceived the police, the way he’d played along with Melody and whoever the hell John was – that could potentially be explained away, fudged somehow, even if he’d suffer the consequences of it over the years to come. Because lying to the police would be much lower down the list in Caitlin’s eyes than the actual reason an eleven-year-old girl went through the trauma of watching her mother kill herself.

  He started coughing again.

  I knelt down beside him and said, ‘Where can I find Melody, Erik? If she’s dead, I need to know where she is. I need to find John.’

  ‘A …’ He stopped. ‘… gus …’

  ‘Angus?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘… gus …’

  ‘Angus? Who’s Angus?’

  He swallowed, took a breath; winced.

  ‘Who’s Angus, Erik?’

  But this time he shook his head.

  ‘Augustine,’ he breathed, and then started coughing again.

  I stopped, looking at him.

  ‘St Augustine’s?’

  He nodded.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘He’s … there …’

  ‘John works at St Augustine’s? He works at the hospital?’

  His eyes started to glaze over. I grabbed him by the arm, pressing hard, trying to force some function back into his body.

  He didn’t react, his eyes still closed.

  Somewhere in the distance, I could hear sirens now. The ambulance was close; the police would be too. I didn’t have long.

  ‘Erik.’

  He jolted again.

  ‘Will I find John at the hospital?’

  It was weak, barely discernible, but he nodded, once.

  I looked around me, trying to make sense of it. John works at the hospital. I thought back to the night I’d gone there to see McMillan and the moments before I blacked out. I’d heard someone else enter the admin block. I’d left McMillan’s office to look for them – but no one was out there. It had felt like I was losing it at the time. But I wasn’t. Someone had been there.

  John.

  ‘Melody …’

  I snapped back to McMillan.

  ‘Melody? What about her?’

  ‘Not dead …’ He drew in a breath. ‘Just gone.’

  I frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

  His head began to drop.

  ‘Erik.’

  His head stayed where it was, but his eyes opened. I crouched down further so we were on the same level, and – in a voice barely above a whisper – he repeated something he’d said to me earlier: ‘He … got rid of her.’

  ‘ “Got rid of her”? What does that mean? Is she dead or isn’t she?’

  ‘Not dead. Someone new.’

  And that was when I finally understood what he was trying to tell me: the name Melody Campbell was gone, the identity – the person that had existed before her disappearance in February 2010. That was what had been got rid of. But the woman herself was still alive.

  She was just someone else now.

  ‘Ease war.’

  ‘What?’ I leaned in towards him again. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Ease war.’

  ‘ “Ease war”? What does that mean?’

  ‘He erased Melody … at … ease war …’

  He stopped again.

  ‘Erased Melody … at … ease war … made Derryn.’

  His eyes fluttered shut, like the wings of a dying bird, and in my head a picture formed, and it was one that I should have seen coming a long time ago. But as clearly as I saw it now, as much as I wanted to ask McMillan if I was right, I couldn’t. I could barely bring myself to form the idea in my head, let alone say the words out loud.

  Not this.

  Not what had been done to Melody Campbell.

  #0899

  I need to tell you something, Derryn.

  As I stand here at your grave, it’s been four months since you died. I’ve had to go back to Erik again, get him to help me. I can see he’s not trying as hard as he could be – not after what happened last time, with Nora – but he knows that he has no choice but to listen; not unless he wants his daughter to hear all about the dirty little secret that cost her mother her life.

  And I think, really, that’s all I need him to do.

  I just need someone to sit there and listen to me. I need to unpack everything in front of him so I can look at it more lucidly. I need to articulate to him how much I miss you. We never got the chance to be together, not properly. In your final few weeks, whenever your husband left, I got inside your house. But it wasn’t the same as being together, as actually existing together, living, cooking dinner, making love. You were barely conscious most of the time. It wasn’t like when we were in hospital together, when you’d sit on the edge of my bed and we’d talk about books. It wasn’t like that
.

  But something has happened.

  This is what I need to tell you about.

  Five weeks ago, I got told I had to go to this tedious recruitment conference in Birmingham with one of the idiots from Psychology. And as much as I wanted to scream in the faces of the people I worked with and tell them I didn’t give a shit about any of it, I told them it was fine and I went. And, Derryn, I think it might have been fate that I was there. If I believed in that sort of thing, I might have seen it as destiny, some thread of a connection between wherever you are now, and me. Because I saw you.

  I saw you in someone else and it floored me.

  She was staying at the same hotel as me. When I went to the conference the next day, I spent my lunchtime searching the show floor for her, and I found her on the Bombardier stand.

  Derryn, it’s you.

  It’s you.

  You and Melody, you aren’t identical. Actually, in quite a number of ways, the two of you are very different. She’s overweight, a brunette, her nose isn’t quite right and her skin much less pristine. She doesn’t have your smile – it’s nearly there, but it’s not quite the same – and her movements are less refined, less lithe, because she’s fat. She doesn’t quite have your confidence either, that little, deliberate hint of mystery. But as soon as I saw her, I saw an echo that was impossible to ignore. As soon as she walked into that hotel, I saw you.

  I saw you in her face, her traits, her characteristics.

  When you died in November, when I watched them take your body out of the house, its scant shape barely existing beneath the sheet, I never thought about how this would end. I know I talked about killing your husband, but there doesn’t seem to be a point now. What would it achieve? It would just make my life more complicated. I hate him for his inadequacy – for the way he failed you when you were sick – but if I killed him and buried him next to Nora, it would just bring questions. It would bring suspicion.

  And I can’t afford for that to happen now.

  See, I’ve got her tied up in the basement. I’m still having a hard time getting over you, and I don’t want to do anything before I’ve cleared this fog away. I need to be absolutely lucid again, like I was when I dealt with Nora.