You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  ‘So is Gary Kent your real name?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked around the place he’d built.

  ‘But I have lots of names for lots of things. One advantage that being a cop does give you is easy access to people’s information. You choose the name of someone who’s been missing a long time, or who’s dead, and you bring them back in from the cold.’

  Multiple identities. Nothing to tie one person to the next, one act to another. But his real identity tied him to this place. He must have realized that, if Field did decide to follow my advice and start checking properties in Mountford Road, she’d find him. That must have been why he’d grabbed her and brought her here.

  Somewhere, a crow squawked, and then another, and then we could hear them on the roof of this part of the house, the clack, clack, clack of their feet, passing from one end to the other.

  ‘Why don’t you feel guilty?’ he said.

  I looked at him. ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t sense one iota of guilt in you. Where’s your guilt over Derryn?’

  I didn’t respond this time.

  ‘Admit that you failed her,’ he said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Admit it. Admit it.’ He brought the knife away from Field’s throat again, using it as a pointer, an extension of his hand, jabbing it into the space above her right shoulder. ‘Admit that you failed her,’ he repeated, his voice more contained, ‘and we move on.’

  ‘Move on to what?’

  ‘Derryn’s ill again, and she needs help,’ he said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I’m going to save her.’

  ‘How the hell are you going to do that?’

  ‘I’m not. You’re going to do it for me.’

  I frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You’re going to go and get her dressed,’ he said, ‘and unless you want me to cut DS Field’s throat, and then travel down to Devon and cut the throat of your daughter, you’re somehow going to get Derryn into A&E, and get that injury of hers looked at.’

  I thought of Annabel, of Olivia too, pictured him inside their house, the two of them trying to hide from him, and my stomach dropped like a stone.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said, knowing where my head was at. ‘And I’ll make it slow.’

  ‘Even if I do take her to A&E, how do I explain who she is?’

  ‘That’s the good bit. You’ll tell them she’s your wife.’

  I looked from him to Field.

  ‘You’re going to give the world what they want to hear,’ he said, ‘what the Met have suspected for a long time, what the journalists have been itching to write about for ever: David Raker, the sham. The impostor. The fraudulent husband. The fake, the charlatan. The man who told the world his wife was dead.’

  ‘She is dead.’

  ‘And who will believe you?’

  ‘None of this will stand up.’

  ‘It’ll stand up long enough to ruin you.’

  I glanced at Field again, and then looked at him.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Once you bring Derryn back to me,’ he said, ‘we’re going to disappear for a while. We’ll make a life for ourselves somewhere else. I’ll feel sad about leaving the police force, it’s been my existence for nearly eight years, it’s where I’ve learned so much about investigation, science, psychology, guilt. I’ll be even sadder to leave this place because I’ve put so much work into it. I mean, it’s art, isn’t it? It’s a painting every bit as beautiful as the ones on the walls in Derryn’s bedroom. Even you have to admit that. You have to admit this place is profound.’ He waited for me to comment, and when I didn’t, he said, ‘Life moves forward. It always moves forward. So you’ll get her seen to, and when she’s better, we all walk away safely.’

  Except that was a lie.

  It was all a lie.

  He might have had plans for himself and Melody, but Field and I weren’t walking away from this safely. We weren’t walking away at all. Because, for all his talk about killing being frightening and messy, our murders were the only way he could create enough breathing room for him to escape successfully. With the two of us out of the way, he had time to reimagine himself, relegating Gary Kent to history alongside John Bennik.

  ‘How did you know so much?’

  He studied me. ‘What?’

  ‘How did you teach Melody so much about me? About Derryn and me? How did you know the private conversations we had? Were you in the house when we talked?’

  ‘I was never in the house when you were there.’

  ‘Then how do you know?’

  He broke into a smile.

  ‘Trade secret,’ he said.

  ‘Just tell me how you know.’

  ‘I said it was a secret.’

  ‘Please.’

  I heard the pleading tone of my voice, the desperation threaded through every word, and hated myself for it. I hated myself for ever having left her, for the moments when I’d gone out for an hour, trying to clear my head, to gather myself. He was right. I’d cried all the time in those last weeks, and it was because I’d known it was over, I’d known the fight was finally at an end, and I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t accept it. All the other times she’d fought, we’d glimpsed the light, some hint of hope like the first strands of a sunrise. The third time there had been no light.

  It had just been a perpetual darkness.

  ‘I will cut her open,’ he said, bringing me back into the moment, the flat of the blade now pressed against Field’s windpipe. ‘I will slice Field’s throat from ear to ear and then I will cut your daughter’s heart out. If you don’t do this for me, I will cut –’

  ‘David?’

  Everything stopped.

  It was Melody.

  80

  She was standing in the hallway, looking in at us, her nightdress clinging to the meagre shape of her body. She was struggling to focus, unbalanced, a finger of blood creeping out from beneath her dressing. She looked brittle and dazed.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he said softly, lovingly, dropping the knife away a little, bringing it around to the side of Field’s neck so that Melody wasn’t able to see it. ‘Sweetheart, go back to bed. I just need to deal with something, okay?’

  She blinked, looking in at us, struggling to focus.

  ‘What’s going on, D?’

  She was looking at him, not me, addressing him, not me, speaking like Derryn, looking like her. When the tears started to well in my eyes, when my vision smeared and she became less defined, it was like I was back in that last month: a moment of déjà vu. Derryn had come down the hallway just like this.

  D? Are you okay?

  I’m fine, sweetheart.

  What’s the matter?

  Nothing. Nothing, I promise. Can I get you something?

  I’m thirsty.

  Okay, you go back to bed. Let me get you a drink.

  Are you sure you’re all right, D?

  And then she could see: I’d been crying. I’d left our bedroom, pulled out a chair at the living-room table, and sat there and cried. I hadn’t wanted her to see me like that, unable to maintain control, unable to keep being the person she needed me to be.

  ‘Go back to bed, sweetheart.’

  His voice brought me round.

  I wiped my eyes and, for the first time, Melody actually seemed to register me. She turned slightly, frowned, looked to Kent, then to Field, then back to me.

  ‘It’s him,’ she said weakly.

  I turned back to Kent, watched the knife drop another inch, the serrated edge coming away from Field’s neck completely, angling down towards the back of her shoulder blade.

  ‘Go back to bed,’ Kent said, more sharply this time.

  Field was staring at me.

  Do something, Raker.

  ‘Go back to bed.’

  Do something now.

  ‘Derryn, get back to your fucking bed.’

  I sprang to my feet.


  Field lurched to her side, dropping off her chair completely, as I smashed into Kent. The two of us crashed into the sideboard. Photograph frames spilled off, glass shattered. Melody screamed. I saw Field scramble across the floor, right at the periphery of my vision, and then Kent and I fell, him landing on top of me, his knees in my stomach.

  My breath hissed out of me.

  Lights. Noise.

  When everything snapped back into focus, I saw he had straddled me and was looking around for the knife. I leaned forward, bringing my torso up even as my pelvis remained pinned beneath him, and swung my handcuffed wrists at his face. I hit him hard. He rolled left, stunned, and then Field appeared behind him, holding the metal pipe I’d brought in with me. A second later, he saw her, started to turn, an arm reaching up to try and grab the pipe.

  I jabbed him hard in the ribs.

  He collapsed again, his arm dropping – and then Field moved in for the kill. She took a step closer, gripped the pipe and crunched it against the side of his head.

  Kent became limp.

  He swayed, leaned.

  And then, finally, he fell sideways and hit the floor.

  AFTER

  * * *

  81

  Once the police interviews were all over, I went to stay with Annabel in Devon. We’d talk at night over dinner, and we’d curl up with Olivia on the sofa and watch old movies, and then, when they went to bed, I’d sit at the window, looking out at the lake beyond their house. I’d watch birds come and go, darting out of the darkness, marks against the moonlit water, and would think of the crows on the roof of the house that Kent had built, and then the crow on the cover of the book I’d found in the loft. Some nights, I would manage to sleep. Most nights, I didn’t. I’d stay awake until the sun started to bleach the sky, and when Annabel asked the next morning how I’d slept, I’d lie and tell her I’d slept well.

  When she was at work and Olivia was at school, I would go over the things I’d said in the interviews. Carmichael had made it clear he didn’t like me, and tried to hammer me on perceived inconsistencies, but – over time – Field’s accounts helped to dilute much of his work. There were things he could have hurt me with – like breaking into Kent’s house – but, ultimately, they were worthless time-sinks in comparison to the scope of what had existed inside. And, in the end, even Carmichael could see the bigger picture: going after me while a Met detective had imprisoned and abused a woman for eight years would play disastrously internally, and even worse in the public arena.

  I never saw or heard from Kent again – except in the media when his picture, an official Met police photograph, would be used – but in the weeks that followed, Field and I spoke on the phone and she filled me in on things he’d admitted to and that investigators had uncovered.

  He was an orphan, brought up as a teenager in the care system in Oxfordshire, erudite and intelligent, even from a young age, and teased mercilessly because of his acne. Before he ever joined the police, he said he’d started stealing identities as a means of escape, a way to reinvent himself, and people who’d known him at UEL – where he studied English and Psychology, as a man called John Bennik – said he could be strange, and sometimes quite awkward. His final-year dissertation was on the work of Eva Gainridge.

  In 2009, the year John Bennik disappeared, Kent joined the Met.

  From there, his talent for appropriating identities, his lies and the stories he created, became a sort of addiction. He was able to use the police databases as a way to remake himself, and to target people, sniffing out men like Gavin Roddat. Roddat was in the computers because a fifteen-year-old girl had told her parents that he slept with her. In the end, there wasn’t enough evidence for the police to pursue the investigation, and the girl didn’t want to press charges, so Roddat got away with it.

  But only until Gary Kent turned up on his doorstep.

  After that, Kent unearthed a succession of people like Roddat – men and women who had secrets they didn’t want outed – dug around, watched them and then threatened to expose them. They never knew who he really was, they just knew he would destroy them. He even leveraged money – small amounts that, collectively, became bigger – which was how he was able to afford the huge renovations at the house in Mountford Road.

  In the weeks that followed his arrest, building firms employed by Kent to work on his property at the east wall said in interviews that Kent had told them he was converting the house into two separate homes, which was why he wanted two kitchens, two living rooms and two main entrances. That was a version of the truth, but as Kent swapped so regularly between contractors, and also did a lot of the interior work himself, no one ever realized the true extent of his plans. And because there were never any visitors to the house, except for McMillan – who visited on the rare occasions that Melody Campbell needed a doctor – no one noticed another weird quirk: next to the second entrance at the back of the property, beyond the barbed-wire gate which led to the front door of the duplicate house, Kent had mounted a small sign reading 40 Aintree Drive. It was why, on that first day, Melody had told Field that she lived with me at my address.

  The story Kent told Melody was that someone lived in the other side of the property, although she said in one interview that she’d thought it slightly odd that she never heard them or saw them and could never open one of the doors on their side of the building. That was the door that led through to the rooms with the photos and the Dictaphone recordings in them. Kent kept them permanently sealed off from Melody, and in the end, like so much else, he trained her to go along with his explanation.

  In stark contrast to those who knew him at university, detectives at the Met never described him as strange or awkward. In fact, quite the opposite. He was sociable, smart and ambitious, loved to learn, and worked hard. He was a natural choice for CID. In fact, he was so successful in hiding who he was, in hiding what he was doing to Melody Campbell, to Erik McMillan, to Gavin Roddat, to all the others, that Field told me a few of her colleagues were visibly upset, even tearful, when they found out the truth.

  ‘They liked him,’ she said. ‘Everyone liked him.’ Including her. ‘He’d been on my team for two years and, until a few weeks ago, I’d have trusted him with my life.’

  Although she’d begun to suspect something was going on with him, she didn’t know what, she just had a hunch it might be related to one of their cases somehow. Enlisting my help had been a shot in the dark, a chance for her to see if she was right and not suffer any of the fallout if my search for Melody went south and she wasn’t. It was also a reaction to bad tactical choices she thought Carmichael was making, but her position on that was a firm second place to finding out the truth about Kent. The fact was, she’d used me, and had been prepared to abandon me to the Met if it came to that, so, at the start of our phone calls, she often began with a half-hearted apology. I believed she meant what she said, that she was sorry, but she wasn’t good at contrition, and it never sounded entirely sincere.

  In truth, deep down, I found it hard to forgive her.

  Evan Willis, the counsellor at St Augustine’s, and the man who’d looked like a good fit for John Bennik, was released by Spanish police within two hours.

  In a strange and unintentional piece of timing, he’d flown out to Spain to meet a woman he’d met online, on the same day Gary Kent had returned from Killiger. Willis and the woman had got on so well, he’d ended up staying in Madrid, neglecting to tell his employers what he was doing and why he wasn’t at work. He’d come to hate his job at St Augustine’s and decided – if he got the sack – it wouldn’t matter much to him.

  ‘I see my future in Spain with Gabrielle now,’ he told the police after.

  In a dark case, it was a rare moment of levity.

  A few times, I asked to see Melody, but all my requests were turned down by the police. I understood why. It would have confused her, and scared her, and ultimately affected her recovery. Field assured me she was safe, receiving counselling, and
already in a deprogramming process aimed at helping her reclaim her former identity – but it would take time.

  Answers would come, but they would come slowly.

  When she was put in touch with extended family, former friends who had known her and worked with her in Belfast, Field told me it had been hard: she didn’t know any of them, didn’t even recognize the shadow of Melody Campbell, except in very brief snatches. And Kent’s story about Melody having a disease where she couldn’t be outside for longer than a couple of hours also made things harder. Like his lie about them having neighbours, it had stuck. It scared her, gnawed at her, and because Kent had repeated it to her over and over, across the entire time they were together, she came to believe it wholeheartedly and without hesitation. Field reported back to me that, as Melody travelled around, or sat outside, she would often start to panic, repeating the lies that she’d been taught.

  Based on information she’d provided, and interviews with Kent, detectives came to the conclusion that – after splitting up with Nora Fray – Kent had moved to a ground-floor flat in Plumstead, under the name of Carl Mulgrew, until early 2011, which was why he knew the area so well. And while the police suspected that he wasn’t being completely honest with them about where he kept Melody after he’d abducted her from the conference in Birmingham, the property he’d lived in also had a basement flat, which had flooded three years previously. It had stayed unoccupied in the time he was living in Plumstead, so they assumed that he’d kept Melody downstairs until he eventually moved to Mountford Road.

  In his home, they found a keycard for St Augustine’s and keys for the locks on the security fences around the nature reserve, which was how he was able to turn up at McMillan’s office uninvited, and take Melody out to the reserve at night. When he came into the hospital, he would always use the south entrance, avoiding cameras. On his instructions, and with the aid of cadaver dogs, they also found a body about fifty feet from the old east wall.