You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  ‘But Derryn can be like that, can’t she?’

  It felt like nails were ripping at my skin. I wanted to grab him. I wanted to hurt him. I hated the sound of her name on his lips.

  ‘She kept asking these questions. These fucking questions.’ He said it through his teeth, flecks of saliva mixing with whorls of dust in the air. ‘No matter how hard I worked, what I tried, the changes to her appearance, the techniques, how isolated I made her or didn’t, I never quite turned her completely. Ninety-nine per cent of her is Derryn. But there was always that one per cent that wasn’t, and when that one per cent was on, that was when the questions would start. Sometimes I’d just flip. I’d have enough of it.’ Kent shrugged. ‘That day, it just happened to be within reach.’

  It. The knife he’d cut her with.

  A hush settled around us.

  ‘Who does she think you are?’ I asked him.

  A flash of anger. ‘What sort of fucking question is that? I’m her husband. We have a life here. We talk about books and art; we watch movies together. We go out to the park and the library. We have a lovely relationship. It’s full of kindness, and fun, and laughter. She trusts me.’

  ‘You kidnapped her.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You kept her prisoner here. You took her from her family.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Her parents died without knowing what happened to their only daught–’

  ‘No. Shut up. Shut up. She loves me.’

  ‘You cut her with a knife.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That night at Chalk Farm, she came out with bruises on her. You hurt her so badly she bled. Her blood was on the door frame. If you loved her, you wouldn’t ever lay a hand on –’

  ‘Shut up.’ He closed his eyes for a second. ‘Shut up,’ he repeated, his chest expanding and contracting, his hand balled into a fist. He shook his head again, as if he were trying to exorcize my voice from his head. ‘I was angry when she turned up there, I know that.’ And then he was suddenly calm again, a switch so instantaneous, it was terrifying. ‘I mean, of course I was angry with her. We’d just had that incident with the knife and then, barely a few days after that, she upped and left me at the pharmacy. Of course I was angry.’

  ‘So you hit her.’

  He swallowed. ‘Do you know why we spent almost an hour in that flat? Because I was hugging her, cuddling her, telling her I loved her and that she was safe.’

  ‘Was that before or after you hit her?’

  His eyes narrowed.

  But then his expression neutralized and it was clear he’d thought of something: a way to get at me. ‘You know,’ he said, turning the knife at Field’s throat, eliciting a gasp from her, ‘when she and I talk, when we share these special moments, it’s rather like old times.’ He paused, waiting for me to catch up. He meant the times he’d spent talking to Derryn – the actual Derryn, my Derryn – when he’d been on the ward. ‘I can just be myself again.’

  Field and I glanced at one another. She swallowed, her eyes wet, her throat shifting up and down behind the blade. Every muscle in my body was on fire. I was shaking from the anger.

  But then, with only two words, he cut me in half.

  ‘Hey, sweetheart,’ he said, his voice like an axe in the chest. I looked at him, at his body, into the blue of his eyes. He was aping my voice. Impersonating me. But not only that: somehow he’d changed himself physically too.

  He’d brought his shoulders up, broadened himself in order to match my build. He held his head at a slight angle, tilted fractionally to the right, something I knew that I did – that I saw reflected back in the mirror sometimes – but was rarely conscious of. He brushed a finger against his eyebrow, another habit of mine when I was deep in thought. He smiled like me, and then he laughed like me, and then, finally, he said, ‘Why don’t you get undressed, sweetheart?’ mimicking my voice again. It wasn’t exactly right, but it was close. All I could do was watch, transfixed. ‘Why don’t you lie on the bed, sweetheart? Why don’t you open your legs, sweetheart?’ He stopped, and the whole façade dropped. ‘You get the idea,’ he said, and as his body relaxed, his voice changed back and he jerked a little, a reminder of the wound he carried.

  I felt light-headed, woozy.

  It was why Melody, on that first day at the station, had suggested that I’d threatened her, hurt her. Because, in the shadows of this house, this museum trapped in time, David Raker had. He was the one who loved her, and comforted her, and slept with her, but he was also the one who isolated her, and destroyed her; broke her, hurt her. To an outsider, even to me, it was impossible to believe that this prison had become normal to her, that she’d come to accept it. But then I remembered that she’d lived like this, every minute of every day, for eight years. He’d cut her to pieces and then stitched her back together, brainwashed her, converted and conditioned her. This was her version of normal.

  ‘I know, sometimes, I let her down,’ he said quietly.

  He moved the blade at Field’s throat, nicking her skin with the edge of it. She flinched and began to bleed from a faint line above her collarbone.

  Kent didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘She’ll ask to go outside and a lot of the time it’s easier just to say no. It’s too risky.’ He shrugged. ‘But I want her to enjoy herself and be happy. That’s why the garden’s nice here. It’s enclosed; no one can see her, but she can be outside, in the air. And when we do go out – I mean, out out – I plan it all properly. We avoid the neighbours, go where people won’t recognize us, and we only do it for short periods. She knows she can’t be away from the house too long, because of the disease she has.’ He eyed me. There was no disease. It was yet more fiction. But Melody believed it – perhaps because Kent used McMillan to reinforce the idea – and I remembered that at the station she’d suggested she couldn’t be out for long periods of time. ‘I told her she wouldn’t ever be able to go outside for longer than a few hours,’ he said, as if he could read my thoughts, ‘otherwise she could become very ill. If she was out for too long, I told her, she’d become bewildered and detached from reality.’

  He repeated it back like it was fact, like everything he was saying was logical.

  ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘if you do things properly, most of what doesn’t make sense gets forgotten, or accepted.’

  He was talking about thought reform.

  Brainwashing.

  ‘I mean, Patty Hearst was running around robbing banks for the SLA after two months. Imagine what you can do to a person’s mind after eight years.’

  He was so matter-of-fact it was horrifying.

  ‘Did you know that, last week, when she talked about you having a breakdown, she was really talking about me? After November 2009, I was very low.’

  November 2009: the month of Derryn’s death. I glanced at his tattoo again, the storm starting to return inside of me.

  ‘I struggled for months and months to get past what happened to her, what she had to endure.’ He adjusted his stance, grimacing slightly. He was talking about Derryn, not Melody, but maybe they were the same person to him now. As that occurred to me, something else hit home too: he couldn’t acknowledge that Derryn was dead; he couldn’t say it out loud. ‘When I saw her up in Birmingham, my head cleared instantly. I could suddenly see a way through it. I’d work on her physical appearance, her weight loss, her memories of things; I’d shave her hair so that I could nurse her back to health, succeed where you failed.’ He paused, the lines between Derryn and Melody becoming more blurred the longer he talked. ‘Sometimes, at night, I take her out to the nature reserve, let her listen to the birds, the river, the sounds of the city. She always says how much she loves it.’

  He looked at me, and a wordless question formed in his face: Why didn’t you ever do that sort of thing for her? And then it changed into something else.

  I’m everything you weren’t.

  I’m everything you should have been.

  �
�We kiss when we’re there,’ he said, ‘and I tell her I love her, and she always forgives me my moments of weakness. Do you ever wish for that?’

  It seemed like he was about to say David, but then he stopped himself, shifting from one foot to another, pushing the serrated blade harder against Field’s throat.

  ‘Do you ever wish for that?’ he repeated.

  He couldn’t say my name. Saying it would be admitting he was a fake.

  ‘Do you ever wish for that?’ he said again.

  ‘Do I ever wish for what?’

  ‘Do you ever wish you could kiss Derryn like me?’

  ‘You don’t kiss her.’

  He frowned.

  ‘The woman in there isn’t Derryn.’

  He gave me a puzzled look, as if he genuinely had no idea what I was talking about – but then he broke into a smile.

  ‘Derryn has had many different stages.’

  And then it felt like the roof was caving in.

  ‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘No.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She’s had many different stages, she’s been sick and she’s been healthy – and I’ve lain with her, and I’ve kissed her, in all of them.’

  79

  It took everything I had not to leap out of my chair and grab him by the throat – even if my hands were cuffed together. I wanted to choke him. I wanted him to feel my fingers crushing his larynx. I wanted his last moments to be raw and painful.

  I wanted him to suffer like I had.

  It coursed through me like a poison, a rush of blood so immense it made spots flash in front of my eyes. I closed them, sucked in breaths, felt the familiar pounding start up, a thump at the back of my skull. But then I looked at him again and I tried to show him he hadn’t won. I tried to suppress every last ounce of revulsion and rage, because I knew I wasn’t in control, and any move I made now put Field’s life at risk.

  ‘I kissed her,’ he said again.

  I stayed still, not taking my eyes off him.

  ‘I kissed her on the lips, on the mouth, as she lay there.’ His fingers wriggled at the knife, adjusting the position of his grip. I was almost retching again. ‘One of us had to be there, because you were so worthless. So weak. I used to watch you come out of the house in those last months, and you were a fucking mess. Tears all down your face. Blubbing like a scolded child. She was in there, fighting for every breath in her lungs, and when she looked at you, what did she see? She saw a man who’d already committed her to the grave. She looked at you and saw no hope – nothing to aim for – so she thought, what’s the point? She may as well give in.’

  ‘She had terminal cancer,’ I said, barely able to speak.

  ‘Nothing is terminal, you fucking coward.’ He spat the words at me. ‘Nothing gives you the excuse to fail her like you did. I spent time alone with her in hospital. I know what sort of woman she was. She and I, we were on the same wavelength. We understood each other. All the shit I’d been through before I met her, the way Nora destroyed me, all the crap Derryn had to deal with the first two times she got sick, we understood that sense of loneliness. She and I, we understood being abandoned and having to face down what scares you, alone. If I’d been there for her properly during her last few months, there’s no way she would have suffered like she did. I would have made it –’

  ‘You don’t know anything about her.’

  His eyes narrowed.

  ‘You’re the same as her – you believe that?’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he replied, ‘I know it.’

  ‘You really think you’re remotely like she was?’

  ‘Yes. We were the same.’

  ‘Of course you weren’t the fucking same,’ I shouted at him. ‘You’re deranged. I spent sixteen years with her, I saw every moment, and she was nothing like you. You have zero in common with her.’ I paused, watching him colour. I knew I had to retreat, to step back for Field’s sake, but I couldn’t stop myself: the rage was spilling out of me. ‘That day you and I first met, that day in the hospital nine years ago – do you remember that?’ It wasn’t a question I needed an answer to, because I knew that he did. ‘I forgot your face. I forgot everything about us meeting until a few days ago, but – when I thought about it, when tiny fragments of it began to return – one thing came through the clearest. I saw Derryn’s expression.’

  He shook his head, knowing what was coming.

  ‘She never even liked you.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘You frightened her.’

  ‘No.’ He lifted the knife away from Field and pointed it at me. ‘You’re a liar.’ He stopped himself, readjusted his stance. ‘You’ve no idea what we were together.’

  ‘You weren’t together.’

  ‘I was there at the end. I saw her every day during that time. I lay next to her in the bed and I held her in my arms. We kissed. She would say my name to me.’

  ‘She didn’t know what she was saying.’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘No.’ My jaw clenched. ‘She was barely conscious.’

  ‘I would talk to her,’ he went on, ‘and she would listen – and where were you? All the times you left the house to do whatever it was that was so important, I was –’

  ‘I hardly left the house.’

  He shrugged. ‘You left it enough.’

  Enough for me to get inside.

  Enough for me to lie with her.

  It felt like I was rupturing open.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I did think about killing you once. I gave serious thought to it. Before I knew she was really sick, I even began planning it out. With you out of the way, things would have been a lot simpler for us. But, ultimately, killing is so messy, and complicated, and frightening. Any pleasure you derive from it is gone before you’ve even had a chance to appreciate it, because there’s so much else to worry about. In The Man with the Wolf’s Head, Eva Gainridge calls murder “an ephemeral act”. I never really knew what she meant until I met Nora, but then it made sense to me. It really is like that: it’s there, and then it’s gone.’

  He seemed to lose himself for a second, and I briefly wondered why he would talk so openly about Nora Fray. Then I remembered that Mulligan, the cop from Sussex, had identified her during our interview in Killiger. The police suspected that John Bennik had killed her.

  Kent must have listened to that interview too.

  He’d listened to everything, because it was the perfect way to keep ahead of the investigation.

  ‘Much more interesting to me,’ he said, ‘is suffering. The things I found out about Erik McMillan, the way he lied to his wife about who he was, the way his actions made her kill herself; and then the things I found out about Gavin Roddat, the way I twisted and used his repellent taste for underage girls against him – both of those were true deaths. They happened slowly, over a long period of time. They weren’t ephemeral.’ But then he stopped, his face dropping; a flicker of sadness. ‘The trouble was, I didn’t expect Gavin to kill himself. That ended up being another moment of panic. I tried to head it off, to buy myself some time just to think straight, but you saw right through it, didn’t you?’

  He meant the evidence that the police had found in Roddat’s possession: the home movies, the photographs, the obsession with Derryn and me.

  ‘She’s never said as much,’ Kent said, ‘but I rather suspect that DS Field saw through it too.’ He brought the knife further around her throat. ‘Am I right, boss?’

  She nodded, her eyes on me, and in them I saw something else: the reason we’d met beneath the arches; the reason, when they’d been interviewing me in my home, that Field had appeared to be silently communicating with me, giving me responses to questions she wasn’t supposed to. She hadn’t gone behind Carmichael’s back because she didn’t like the way he was running the case – or, at least, that wasn’t the primary driver. It was because she knew something was off much closer to home.

  This was what she was keeping back from m
e.

  ‘You started to suspect Kent,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’ Kent asked her.

  A single nod of the head. ‘Yes.’

  It was the first time she’d spoken since she’d arrived at the house. Her voice was small, ragged.

  ‘Did you know he used to be John Bennik?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Never.’

  ‘You just felt something wasn’t right about him?’

  ‘He was acting differently,’ she said softly. ‘Quieter, more on edge. He kept poring over case files – but not in a normal way. It was almost obsessive. He had to see everything. He was there before me every morning and after me every night. I just never realized it was this case he was looking at – all the evidence, all the interviews.’

  ‘I thought I was being careful,’ Kent interjected, ‘but you saw right through it, didn’t you, boss? And there were other things. Like, why would I come into the office on my day off like that when I never had before? Or, when she ordered me to call McMillan on the phone and ask some initial questions, why did I make an excuse and tell her I couldn’t? Why was I always making excuses about not being able to call McMillan, or speak to him face-to-face?’ He angled the knife slightly, taunting her with a sawing motion. ‘McMillan didn’t know I was a cop. He didn’t know my name was Gary Kent. I’d told him my name was John. But he would have recognized my voice if I’d ever spoken to him on the phone in my role as a cop, and especially my face if I’d gone to his office. That was why I couldn’t have anything to do with him, and that was why her curiosity was aroused.’ He looked down at Field. ‘Am I right, boss?’

  ‘You wanted me to smoke Kent out?’ I said to Field.

  ‘I had no idea it was this,’ she replied, ‘I swear to you. I thought he might have been on the take, maybe protecting someone else. Not this – not ever.’

  As she said that, something else slotted into place: this was the real reason that she leaked the story to FeedMe. Not because she wanted to know who the woman was, and what I might be hiding, or not only that; rather, it was because she knew the story would spread quickly, and the quicker it spread, the quicker it would reveal potential anomalies – anomalies like a liar embedded in her own team.