You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  Silence.

  The fact that Carmichael wasn’t arguing with me about any of it suggested he and his team – perhaps Field and Kent too – had all assumed the same thing, or something close to it.

  As I waited, I thought of that first day, of Field telling me that Melody had £22 on her, of me following her to Chalk Farm that night and seeing her glance at a digital watch she’d been keeping in her pocket. Bennik must have given her enough money to buy whatever the pharmacist recommended for the cut on her arm, and set a timescale to do it in: the watch was to make sure she didn’t take longer than he ordered. Again, that fed into the way he’d changed her – controlled her, governed her.

  ‘So she wasn’t escaping him?’ Mulligan asked. ‘After he left her at the pharmacy, she wasn’t fleeing him, she was simply confused?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, nodding. ‘She is, basically, deeply confused. At Charing Cross, she claimed to Field that she’d been missing eight years, and then denied ever saying it. Maybe she gets these flashes – these moments of clarity, of truth – like instinctively knowing the police station at Charing Cross, or the flat at Chalk Farm, or the fact she’s been missing – but then it all goes again. The rest of the time, she’s Derryn.’

  Carmichael kept going with the questions, but it became obvious that he was no longer trying to fill in the gaps; instead, he was attempting to catch me out. I batted back his attempts to corner me, Mulligan watching silently, until he finally called time on the interview.

  By then, the sky had lightened outside the windows of the truck.

  I sat on a bank of grass, overlooking the cove I’d chased John Bennik across the previous night, and watched the sun bloom in the sky. I thought about Melody, the person she believed that she was now, where she might be and how the police would ever find her. I thought about the terrible things Bennik must have done to her over the last eight years to make her think she was Derryn. And then, finally, I thought about the last weeks of Derryn’s life. Without the adrenalin charging through me, without the tightrope walk of trying to keep Erik McMillan alive and breathing, it fully started to hit me: Bennik had been there. He’d been there at the end of Derryn’s life.

  He could have stood next to her bed.

  He could have touched her.

  He could have done all of that, and worse, and I never even realized. I felt the anger course through me, trapped in every muscle – every fibre and vein and artery – and, once that began to subside, I started to feel light-headed and sick. I retched, and then again, and again, until eventually I took myself away, out of sight, and vomited.

  And after that, away from the police and forensic teams, away from the locals gathered on the road looking on, I bowed my head, and I closed my eyes, and I cried.

  70

  I pulled into my driveway, switched off the engine and just sat there, looking out through the windscreen at my house. It was dark, its windows opaque, silent as a crypt except for the rain running out of the gutters and into the drains. I didn’t want to go inside. I didn’t want to be in there, in the hallways and rooms whose purity had been destroyed, whose entire history had been rewritten in the last few weeks of Derryn’s life without me ever knowing. Once, it had been a unique part of our identity, a place in which we were going to start a family; eventually, I managed to make it some sort of a sanctuary in the months and years after she died.

  Now it was nothing to me, just bricks and mortar.

  Just a place John Bennik had poisoned.

  I let myself in, grabbed a change of clothes and then left again, driving south to Kew, where there was a motel I’d used before for people I needed to keep hidden. It was big and ugly on the outside and basic on the inside, but it was quiet and clean, and – because of the time of year, the decorations gone, the festivities doused – I didn’t have any trouble finding a room. I paid for two nights, but told the woman on reception it was likely I’d need more, and then hauled my luggage up to the fourth floor. Once I was inside, I collapsed on to the bed.

  I went into a dead sleep and didn’t wake until 9 p.m. Briefly disorientated, I got up and sat at the edge of the bed, trying to clear my head in the dark. I felt nauseous, there was a dull pounding behind my eyes, my muscles were compressed and painful, and – somewhere deeper and more difficult to locate – I felt absolutely broken.

  I got up and went to the window, watching the lights of the city blink, and then showered and changed and headed downstairs to the empty restaurant. There wasn’t much of a choice on the menu, so I ordered a sandwich, a bowl of chips and a pint of beer and sat in the corner with my phone and my laptop, trying to find out how much my home was worth. I looked at houses in Ealing, in Brentford, Chiswick, Kew, and then realized, if I really was going to move, it made no difference if I stayed in this part of London any more; maybe it didn’t make a difference if I stayed in London at all. I was on my own; alone. I could live anywhere I wanted. The house was supposed to have been the beginning, not the beginning of the end, and the only thing that had ever kept me in Ealing was the emotional connection I had to it.

  A moment later, my phone went.

  It was Annabel.

  I picked up. ‘Hey, sweetheart.’

  ‘Hey. How are you?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  She didn’t respond straight away, halted by the fracture in my voice. I mostly tried to protect her from moments like this, from concerns about me, but it was hard to rise above it now.

  ‘You sound sad,’ she said, obviously thrown. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine. I’ll tell you about it some other time.’

  ‘Is it this case? This thing with …’

  She was going to say Derryn, but stopped.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s been hard.’

  ‘I’m glad I called, then,’ she said, and I admired her, and loved her, for how reassuring she was trying to be. ‘I wanted to say that I’m sorry again. All the stuff I read about you and that woman on FeedMe, the way she looked, I realized I must have sounded like I didn’t believe you when we talked. But I do. I really do.’

  ‘I appreciate that.’

  Neither of us spoke for a moment.

  ‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘after this is over, maybe you could come down again and stay with Liv and me for a while. We loved having you here over Christmas, and there’s at least three more board games in the loft that we haven’t played yet.’

  That made me smile.

  ‘I’d love that. Thank you.’

  ‘I’m so sorry again for doubting you,’ she said, but I told her not to worry, and meant every word of it. She didn’t need to apologize. I’d quickly come to understand her suspicions on the morning she’d found the FeedMe article.

  I’d been questioning my own sanity.

  Maybe, quietly, I still was.

  DAY SEVEN

  * * *

  71

  The next morning, I was having breakfast in the restaurant, alone except for a group of tourists and two men talking about a work colleague, when the call came through.

  It was a private number.

  I put down my knife and fork and picked up.

  ‘It’s me,’ Field said, as soon as I answered.

  ‘Have you found her?’

  I could hear the desperation in my voice.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  I pushed my half-eaten plate to one side and slumped back in the booth, a knot forming in my stomach. It had been over a day since I’d left Killiger, and the police still hadn’t located Melody Campbell.

  There was, however, some good news.

  Field had already called me early this morning – the first time we’d spoken since our meeting under the arches – and told me that, in their search for John Bennik’s real identity, they’d zeroed in on a man called Evan Willis. Willis ticked all the boxes. He’d been a counsellor at St Augustine’s since 2012 and hadn’t been seen since the night of the events at Killiger. He’d called in sick that day,
presumably so he could watch me and track my movements down to Sussex, and then hadn’t phoned his manager since, not responding to text messages or repeated phone calls. When the police went to his flat in Forest Hill, they found it empty. Clothes were missing from the wardrobe, his wallet, phone and passport were all gone, and at four thirty yesterday morning – about the same time as I was sitting with Carmichael and Mulligan answering their questions – Willis had withdrawn £250 from an ATM on the South Circular. A few hours later, he’d used a credit card at Gatwick Airport to pay for a flight to Madrid. A couple of hours after that, he landed at Barajas Airport. Willis – who also matched the physical description of Bennik: stocky, dark hair, a beard – was in Spain before the police had even finished scouring employee records at St Augustine’s.

  ‘Has he used his card again?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s what I’m calling about. He used it an hour ago.’

  ‘Is he still in Madrid?’

  ‘Looks like it. He withdrew two hundred and sixty euros from a cash machine in the lobby of a hotel on the Gran Vía. The Palacio Verde. He’s staying in Room 439. We’re speaking to police in Madrid now. All being well, we should have the bastard in cuffs in an hour.’

  I felt a slight sense of relief, although it was only brief. Even with Bennik – Evan Willis – in custody, it didn’t help Melody Campbell. It had been six days since she disappeared in Chalk Farm, almost four since she was in my house, and she still might not have had treatment for the cut on her arm. If Bennik had put her somewhere, there was no way he could move her now that he was hundreds of miles away. That meant her injury could be worse than ever. It could be critical.

  I just hoped she was still alive.

  ‘Have you found any CCTV footage at St Augustine’s of Bennik and McMillan together?’

  ‘Willis,’ Field corrected.

  ‘Willis, Bennik – it doesn’t really matter much any more, does it?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘we haven’t. Well, not in the same room together, anyway. The administration block, where McMillan’s office is, has two entrances, but only one of them has a camera. The west entrance, opposite the lift, we’ve got; the south entrance, accessed via the stairs – which is the route that you were brought in on – doesn’t have any CCTV. We’ve managed to get some film of Willis going into the administration block a couple of months ago, although we can’t confirm whether he went to see McMillan or not. My guess is that he did, because that backs up the idea that he would visit McMillan when he needed something.’

  ‘But there’s nothing more recent?’

  ‘No, nothing. Listen, are you free this morning?’

  ‘Why?’

  I heard the line drift, the echo of footsteps and a door close. She was moving somewhere more private. ‘You’re still on Carmichael’s shitlist,’ she said, ‘but he can’t find anything to corner you with. So, in the spirit of cooperation, I need you to help me with something. It’ll aid your cause here, with Carmichael and all his friends, and it’ll make it look like you don’t have anything to hide …’

  She trailed off, letting her words hang there: the two of us had found a middle ground, a place where we were willing to work together, to trade information, but it didn’t mean she found me entirely trustworthy. The feeling went both ways: I still wasn’t one hundred per cent clear on why she’d offered to help me. I’d asked her what her real motivation was then, because it had felt like she was holding something back from me, but she’d palmed me off. And then I’d asked her this morning why she’d never told me about the man on the CCTV video or the fact that McMillan owned a Lexus, and she put both down to an oversight, to the pressure of having to tell me so much, so quickly, at the arches. It didn’t feel like the truth.

  So what was her game?

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘Carmichael wants you to physically walk us through that night at the hospital. The night you went to see McMillan.’ A pause. ‘The night you …’ Blacked out. ‘We’re trying to piece together the timeline.’

  ‘In order to do what?’

  ‘In order to figure out what the truth is. You went there on the 29th of December, your blood test seemed to suggest he drugged you, you woke up at home, say you spent the whole day at home on the 30th of December, but we’ve got security camera footage of you wandering into shot – on the evening of the 30th – and plonking yourself down outside the front gates of St Augustine’s.’

  ‘I told you, I don’t remember –’

  ‘Before you get all antsy with me, we’re not suggesting you deliberately lied to us. McMillan roofied you. You were clearly confused. But we need to figure out what happened on the night of the 30th of December, including how you ended up getting back to the hospital and why you came back, because that was also the night that McMillan – according to his security card – clocked out at 7 p.m., and almost certainly made a break for Killiger. If Willis gets picked up in Madrid this morning, there’s just no way we can go into a potential prosecution with big blank spaces like this. I mean, you could sail the Titanic through this case, which means the defence will have a field day. So, with McMillan dead and Willis in Spain pretending he’s Ronnie Biggs, you’ll have to do.’

  She said it as a joke, but it wasn’t. If the Met could have avoided using me to help their case, they would have.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘Carmichael’s got half the hospital cordoned off, so you won’t be able to park on site. There’s a housing estate next door, so you’ll have to use the street there. That might be for the best, anyway: the press have caught wind of this.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘They’re sticking to the front gates like flies on shit.’

  ‘I bet they are.’

  I’d been part of that feeding frenzy once, so I understood their motivation perfectly. A kidnapped woman kept prisoner for almost eight years, the killer of a respected doctor still on the run, the missing persons investigator who couldn’t stay out of trouble: it had all the ingredients they, and the television networks, would need. I’d spent much of my morning screening my calls and not listening to any of my voicemail messages. I’d gone out for a run to try and escape them and had returned to find a journalist waiting in the motel reception for me.

  As I thought of that, I thought of Kennedy, of the journalist who’d turned up at the cottage down in Devon, asking questions. Kennedy had called me just before breakfast to say that he was in a motel in Newcastle for now, but it didn’t make me any less anxious about the reporter from the Daily Tribune, or how much digging he might be prepared to do. I’d lied to everyone about Kennedy’s death, including Annabel. I’d perjured myself in front of the Met for his benefit, in an effort to give him some version of a life. But if the press found him, the police would too, and none of that would matter.

  If they found him, I was going to prison.

  ‘Is there any way for us to avoid the press altogether?’ I asked Field. ‘Or is there genuinely only one way in and out of that place?’

  ‘That’s what they tell the public,’ Field said.

  ‘So there is another entrance?’

  ‘One other, but it’s only accessible on foot and you have to go through the nature reserve. The hospital don’t use it any more and keep it locked up, but they told Carmichael about it and he made them open it for us. So we can come and go through there without having to speak to the media. That’s part of the reason why I said to use the housing estate.’

  ‘Is it easy to find?’

  ‘Yeah. The gate’s on Mountford Road, just next to the hospital.’

  I didn’t say anything, my head filling with images of the last time I’d been inside St Augustine’s – listening to McMillan’s lies, glimpsing Bennik’s shadow in the half-light of the office.

  Blacking out.

  ‘Raker?’ Field said. ‘I’ll see you in an hour, okay?’

  I didn’t want to go back there.

  I just wanted this to be over.

  ‘Ok
ay?’

  I told her it was fine, but something didn’t feel right. It curdled in my stomach. I just couldn’t decide if it was the idea of going back to the hospital, the thought of being cornered by the press – or the fear that I’d missed something big.

  72

  Field arrived late.

  It had been sleeting all morning and there was no shelter anywhere, so I just had to stand there, freezing cold and pissed off, and let the wind cut through me for twenty minutes.

  Mountford Road was a long cul-de-sac lined with 1930s terraced houses that ran along the eastern boundaries of what was now the nature reserve, but had once been the other half of St Augustine’s Hospital. The gate was halfway along the street, at the end of a path between houses, and was part of an eight-foot perimeter fence. There were signs all across it – NO ENTRY! TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED! DANGER! – and the gate had been padlocked top and bottom. Beyond the fence, it was wild and overgrown, a sweep of rampant, unchecked greenery pockmarked by crumbling, long-abandoned buildings.

  By the time Kent pulled into a parking spot further down Mountford Road, I was soaked to the skin, chilled to the bone and ready to head back to the motel. Field got out straight away, already in a raincoat, and came towards me. She’d seen the weather; she saw my expression.

  ‘Sorry we’re so late.’

  ‘You said ten thirty.’

  She held up a hand. ‘I know.’

  Kent joined us, sleet dotting the shoulders of his jacket, his face, his hair, and smiled apologetically. ‘There was an accident in the Blackwall Tunnel,’ he said. It was the first time he’d ever been anything approaching sympathetic to me, but I couldn’t decide if it was because he genuinely believed I had no involvement in this – in the disappearance of Melody Campbell, in her imprisonment, in the crimes of John Bennik – or because he needed my cooperation for the time being.