You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  ‘Mr Raker?’

  Mulligan looked at me, Carmichael stared harder: they could see I’d tuned out, and Carmichael especially wanted to know why.

  ‘You said his work reported him missing?’ I asked Mulligan.

  ‘Yes. The fake John Bennik was studying at the University of East London,’ she said, ‘but he was also working part-time in student services there. He was a mature student: an undergrad between 2004 and 2007 – aged twenty-one to twenty-four – and then he completed an eighteen-month Masters in Applied Psychology a couple of months after your wife died.’

  ‘And he just disappeared after that?’

  ‘According to what we’ve been able to find out, just after he finished his Masters he accompanied one of the psychology lecturers to a recruitment conference at the NEC, on behalf of the university. This would have been the end of February 2010.’

  ‘The same conference Melody was at.’

  ‘Yes. We called UEL and they said they used to use the conference as a way to recruit talented lecturers and that Bennik – as part of his role working in student services – would have been there to do a lot of donkey work for the other staff. Two days in, he vanished. The last time anyone saw him, he was talking to a woman matching Melody Campbell’s description outside the hotel.’

  We fell into silence for a while, processing everything.

  And then, quietly, Mulligan said, ‘Before that, in January 2009, when he was admitted with the skull fracture, he was treated at the Royal London Hospital.’

  She looked at me and got her answer, even before the question had formed in her mouth. Derryn had started work at the Royal London Hospital just before Christmas. She’d been really excited about it, even though it was a fifty-minute commute. She loved nursing, loved being on the ward, loved helping people. Her career had always been a calling. And that particular job had felt like such a break, such a huge stroke of good fortune, because she’d walked straight into it a fortnight after we got back from our year in LA.

  But nothing about it seemed fortunate now.

  Because, inside a matter of weeks, she’d met the man who called himself John Bennik – and that had been the spark that, nine years later, would become a fire that had almost consumed me.

  69

  Derryn had treated a killer.

  She’d talked to him, dressed his wounds, reassured him. Knowing her, she would have smiled at him, laughed politely, listened when he tried to be serious. The very idea of her doing those things for him, basic though they were, cleaved me apart. As I pictured her, unaware of who he was and what he’d done – of what he would become after that – I felt nausea bubble at the base of my throat.

  ‘As DI Mulligan told you,’ Carmichael said, returning me to the moment, a subtle emphasis on told you, as if Mulligan had betrayed the entire investigation, ‘we don’t have a clear idea of what John Bennik looks like. We have a description from the lecturer he attended the conference with, but after eight years, it’s vague. Medium build, medium height, dark hair. We’re not going to get very far with that, are we?’

  I looked at him, saw his mouth moving, but it was like my hearing was defective, ringing from the aftermath of an explosion. All I could hear was Derryn; all I could see was her talking to a man – faceless, impossible to identify – from the edge of a hospital bed.

  ‘He never applied for a driving licence,’ Carmichael continued, ‘or a passport in the Bennik name before he – quote, unquote – “disappeared”, and we’ve managed to speak to a few people at UEL, but after all this time they barely remember him. We’re waiting to hear back from some former students he attended classes with, but in the meantime, can you think of anyone else who might be able to give us a description of what this John Bennik looks like?’ He meant McMillan was dead, so was Gavin Roddat, and Melody was still missing. ‘Something more useful than just medium build, medium height,’ he added, forcing the point home.

  I ignored the jibe and tried to gather myself, to push the image of Derryn and the shadow man from my head. ‘He may have a tattoo,’ I said.

  Carmichael leaned in slightly. ‘A tattoo?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I don’t, not for sure. If he does, I don’t know where on his body it is, or what the tattoo is of, but if he’s an employee at the hospital and he does have a tattoo, that should make him easier to find. The fact that he wasn’t working last night and he’s going to be returning to London with some sort of injury from the stab wound that McMillan gave him will help too. And if all of that fails, there must be CCTV cameras around the hospital.’

  ‘Check the hospital’s CCTV cameras.’

  I looked at Carmichael.

  ‘Never thought of that,’ he said caustically. ‘Good job you’re here.’ I felt a pulse of anger, but said nothing. Carmichael carried on: ‘What about Gavin Roddat?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Well, we know it was a set-up,’ he said. I was guessing they’d known for a while. The files on his laptop, the hard drive under his bed, every piece of digital evidence would have shown the same thing: movement of data on or around the date of Roddat’s death – because all those things had been planted after his suicide. ‘So you think, whoever Bennik really is, he had something over Roddat, just like he did with McMillan?’

  I shrugged. ‘That would be my best guess.’

  ‘But what exactly? Roddat’s got no record.’

  ‘That’s totally irrelevant. McMillan didn’t have one either, and he spent the last five days lying to you. What McMillan and Roddat had, were secrets. My guess is something was weighing on both their consciences.’

  ‘McMillan never mentioned anything to you?’

  Yes.

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  ‘And what would Roddat’s secret be?’

  ‘Again, I don’t know.’

  ‘And Bennik was threatening to tell the world about whatever it was these men had done, if they didn’t do his bidding?’ Carmichael paused, letting the question hang there: he made it sound improbable, but it was what had happened. I felt certain of it. It was patently Bennik’s speciality: he zeroed in on a weakness – a mistake, an emotional vulnerability, a fear – and he used it like a weapon. That was exactly what he’d tried to do to me as well.

  ‘So, whatever Roddat did,’ Carmichael said, trying to maintain the pressure on me, ‘it was serious enough that he’d let himself be manipulated like that?’

  ‘A lot of us have done things in our past that we regret – or that we never want made public,’ I said.

  ‘Are you talking about yourself here?’

  ‘I’m making a general point.’

  ‘I’m sure you are,’ he said dismissively. ‘So Roddat walks Melody out of that flat in Chalk Farm, in full view of a camera, knowing it will totally fuck up his life?’

  ‘I doubt, even for a second, he thought about being caught on camera. Roddat was just a patsy. He was petrified. Whatever happened to Melody at the flat in Chalk Farm that night, whatever the reason for her having blood on her face and a bruise on her neck, it wasn’t Roddat who did those things, it was Bennik. The guy in the footage you can’t get in touch with, the guy who walks the old woman out of the stairwell, that’s him. That’s Bennik. He was already waiting outside the flat when the other two arrived. He must have gone there early to scope out the area.’

  I watched Carmichael: he was trying to remember if he’d ever told me about the guy in the footage, about the fact that they hadn’t been able to ID him, which he hadn’t. Field had.

  ‘That night,’ I went on, ‘Roddat arrived and opened up the flat for Bennik, because that’s all Roddat was to him: a guy with access to empty properties and a secret that Bennik could make use of – at least, until Roddat had enough of being blackmailed and took his own life. Bennik put the bruises and the blood on Melody. He was the reason she looked scared shitless as she left. He was angry with her for wandering o
ff at the pharmacy, so he said something to her, must have hit her, and after it was over, he told them to meet him somewhere. That was what he also needed Roddat for: to be the one caught on camera, leading Melody back out again.’

  ‘You tailed her that night at Chalk Farm,’ Carmichael said, his tone heavy with the accusation.

  ‘I’ve already admitted that.’

  ‘Why would Melody call Field and Kent to tell them you did that?’

  ‘Panic,’ I said.

  ‘Panic?’

  ‘Bennik was panicking. He was in the flat, saw me arrive after her, the alarm bells went off, and so he got her to make the call. He’s smart and devious, but a lot of what he’s done over the past week isn’t thought through. It’s a reaction. Trying to shift the attention to me with that call to Field and Kent; using Roddat in the way he did. He must have been watching me, and when I figured out where McMillan was hiding, he must have done the same. I mean, he’d been to these cottages with Melody before – did you know that? So he knew where they were. He knew they were affiliated with St Augustine’s and that, this time of year, they’d be empty. But Bennik’s lack of preparation is all over the bedroom in there: he came here to kill McMillan because he realized everything was getting out of hand, and he succeeded eventually – but not before McMillan managed to stick him with the knife he kept under his pillow.’

  ‘If he’s such a panicker, why is he only just coming up for air now?’

  ‘Because he’s never made a mistake as big as the one he made at the pharmacy. He’s become extremely good at keeping Melody hidden, at isolating her enough, at controlling her when they’re out in the open and disconnecting her from the world when they’re not. In fact, in some ways, in how he’s managed to break her down, in the way he’s built this model of a husband and wife – one that she seems to believe, that she’s totally compliant in now – he might be one of the most frightening people I’ve ever known.’ I looked between them. ‘When he brought her down here in 2013 for a holiday, he must have found out about the cottages from McMillan. He probably got McMillan to book it, to organize it, and then he came here with Melody as a couple. That wasn’t a role he was playing, that was what he genuinely believed they were. A couple. Holidays are what couples do. I imagine it was the first time he’d ever chanced anything like that – and, after what happened at the deli here, probably the last.’

  ‘You mean, her wandering off?’ Mulligan asked. I’d told them already about the tweets I’d found, how they’d allowed me to zero in on Killiger as a location.

  ‘Yes. Maybe she didn’t do it deliberately, but she wandered off from wherever they were. She’d been with Bennik for two and a half years by then. Two and a half years is a long time to be under someone else’s control, but maybe not enough time to turn you completely. That was why she acted so strangely with that woman in the deli, why she still felt a connection to Belfast, to the name Melody.’ I shrugged. I didn’t know any of this for sure – none of us did, not yet – but it fit too perfectly to simply be a hunch. ‘Like I said, while he let her out in public again, to go to places like the library in Plumstead, I suspect he was always with her, even if it didn’t appear like that. He’d be close by the whole time. He was never going to let her out of his sight again like he did down here – or, at least, that had been the plan until last Thursday, at the pharmacy.’

  Mulligan said, ‘I want to ask you about the pharmacy in a second, but why did she go to the flat in Chalk Farm? I mean, how did she even know about it?’

  I’d thought about that a lot. Why go to Chalk Farm?

  ‘She was carrying a Post-it note,’ I replied, ‘I assume with the address of the flat on it. I think she’d probably written it down. Or maybe it was another location, like Charing Cross, that she “felt” she should go to. That was what she said that first day: she “felt” she had to come to Charing Cross police station. She told DS Field that “something sparked” – a recollection, a memory. Maybe something sparked about that flat. Maybe in the same way something sparked for her in 2013 when she remembered Belfast.’

  ‘So is she suffering from amnesia?’ Mulligan asked. It was clear she was having a tough time filling in the blanks with a lot of this. I didn’t blame her: it was so hard to drop into something this dense. ‘ “Something sparked” – it sounds like she’s suffering from some sort of memory loss if she’s struggling to recall things.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s that.’

  ‘So what do you think it is?’

  ‘It’s like I said, I think Bennik completely broke her down.’

  ‘Broke her down?’

  ‘In order to rebuild her as someone else.’

  Mulligan became more animated. ‘Are you talking about thought reform?’

  ‘Thought reform, coercive persuasion, whatever you want to call it – but yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. The way he’s isolated her, the way that she’s become entirely dependent on him, the fear she has of him, and the way she seems to dread the idea of stepping out of line – they’re the kinds of techniques that cults use all the time. They’re what Manson and Jim Jones did. Destroying a person’s sense of self, that’s the kind of thing the Koreans were doing to American POWs back in the fifties. Remember, Melody has probably been under his control for the entire time she’s been missing. That’s almost eight years.’

  ‘So you think she’s lost her sense of self?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Do you know anything about her upbringing?’

  I saw what Mulligan was driving at, had already noted her use of the term thought reform, and wondered if she, like Bennik, had a background in psychology.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Only what I’ve been able to find out on the web. Her parents are dead, she has no siblings. I don’t know much more about her, really.’

  ‘So if Bennik is her “husband”, is he pretending to be you?’

  I shrugged again. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t have any proof, just a working theory. But, yes, I absolutely believe he’s told her his name is David Raker.’

  He’s pretending to be me. My name. My history.

  Even thinking about it made me sick, the way he’d created a different version of me, a copy, and had used it to control and imprison someone.

  As I thought of that, I thought of that time alone with Melody in the house. That was the first and only occasion we met face-to-face. At the police station, I’d been in another room, watching her on a CCTV feed. So when she’d been asking Field if she could see David Raker, she didn’t mean me – she meant Bennik’s version of me – and because Melody and I never met that day, she thought the person watching on CCTV was Bennik.

  Which meant what?

  It means, at the house, she must have been playing a role at Bennik’s behest. It was all just an act. He told her to pretend, for those few short hours, that I was her husband, and she agreed, because that was how their relationship worked. That almost certainly explained why she was in tears by the end, bewildered about who I was, uncertain about why her husband was making her cook dinner for a stranger, hug him, pretend he was the person she loved. I started to turn it all over in my head, trying to see everything clearly, and then I remembered something that Melody had said to me right before I’d blacked out for the second and final time.

  I don’t even recognize you.

  I thought she’d meant she didn’t recognize the man I’d become – the illness I was supposed to have, the way I treated her – but she didn’t mean that at all.

  She meant she literally had no idea who I was.

  ‘You really think he’s calling himself David Raker?’ Mulligan asked.

  ‘Privately, when he’s alone with her,’ I said. ‘Not publicly. Publicly, he’ll be someone else entirely. If he has a degree in Applied Psychology, if he works at the hospital, you’re looking at someone smart, adaptable, probably extremely well liked and sociable. He won’t be odd and insular; he won’t appear aggressive and hostile.
That would just bring questions he doesn’t want.’ I shrugged again. ‘I don’t know any of this for certain, but if he is me, he believes he’s a better version of me. He kept her alive when I failed –’

  ‘You’re talking about brainwashing,’ Carmichael scoffed, and for the first time I saw an overt flash of irritation on Mulligan’s face. She tried to disguise it by looking down at her notes, but it was clear that she saw some sense in what I was trying to argue; its echoes in the evidence.

  To Carmichael, it was just another lie for me to hide behind.

  ‘From what I can tell,’ I said, looking pointedly at Mulligan, not him, ‘Bennik developed a fascination with my wife in the months before she died in 2009. I’m not sure he realized she was sick until quite late on – so whatever plans he had for her, and for me, got cut short. One of the reasons he became so interested in Melody was because he saw the similarities between her and Derryn – he saw beyond the fact that Melody was overweight, that she had different-coloured hair, all of that, and he zeroed in on the physical characteristics they did share. But it was more than that. I saw it that first day at Charing Cross too. It’s not just a physical likeness: it’s behavioural, emotional.’

  ‘So you are talking about brainwashing?’ Carmichael asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘At this point, I doubt she even remembers Melody Campbell – just flashes. I believe she went to Charing Cross because she was confused, unsure of why Bennik had left her at the pharmacy, and because she had some memory of the station. He drove off because he got into an argument with a traffic warden about where he’d parked, and then became concerned that the traffic warden would note down the registration of the car and, worse, issue a ticket, find out who he was and put his details into the system. And if his details were in the system somewhere, he was suddenly on the radar. It was another moment of panic. I think I’m right in saying there are no CCTV cameras near the pharmacy, which would have been the point – he’d definitely have known that – so I can only take a guess at this, but I’d be willing to bet that Bennik was gone very little time at all. I bet he went away, turned around and came back for Melody, knowing that the traffic warden would have moved on – but Melody was already gone.’