You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  It was Nora Fray, his former girlfriend.

  He blamed the murder on his fragile mental state at the time, and on Eva Gainridge, who he said put ideas into his head with the story of Oliver Beaumont, the violent protagonist of The Man with the Wolf’s Head. When that didn’t stick, he switched the blame to Erik McMillan, who was treating him at the time Nora Fray was murdered, saying McMillan encouraged him to kill Nora – but, again, no one placed much stock in it. Eventually, when he failed to alter the axis of the case with any of those things, he tried telling police the truth about Erik McMillan, about how McMillan had been gay and emails sent between him and Bruce Dartford had led to Kelly McMillan killing herself. But that failed to stick either. The emails were gone, I’d torn up the letter McMillan had written to his daughter, Kelly was dead, and so were McMillan and Dartford.

  In the end, Caitlin McMillan was devastated by the murder of her father, but at least her pain was a little less than it might have been. In the moments of confusion that had riddled me for a week, I’d been seeing clearly that night in Killiger: ripping up the letter was the right thing to do. If Caitlin had known the truth, if she’d read her father’s words, she’d have been overwhelmed by the sense of betrayal, and plagued by it for years.

  And if I’d learned anything in the time since Derryn had been gone, it was this: just losing the person you loved the most in the world was sufficient.

  Grief was bad enough on its own.

  82

  In the immediate aftermath of Kent’s exposure, I received so many calls from the media, had so many people camped outside my home and the motel I was still sleeping in, that I had to switch hotels entirely and change phones. I always kept a spare one at home, as well as the prepaid, but only a few people knew the number of the spare.

  Annabel. Ewan Tasker.

  Kennedy.

  The call from the media that concerned me the most wasn’t any of the ones trying to chase down an angle on the Gary Kent case, it was the one I received from Connor McCaskell at the Daily Tribune. When I checked in with my regular phone, I found a message from him on there. He’d only left one, and it had landed two days after the events at the house – way after every other one of his peers had called.

  It was because he had something his rivals didn’t.

  ‘Mr Raker,’ he said, ‘it’s Connor McCaskell from the Daily Tribune. I get that you’re not picking up your calls, but it’s in your interests that we speak, believe me.’

  I called him back.

  ‘Great to talk to you,’ he said, like we were old friends.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to talk to you about Bryan Kennedy.’

  I remained silent but, inside, I was startled and unnerved.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s renting from you, right?’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘He’s not any more?’

  ‘No. Why are you so interested in him?’

  ‘I’m not,’ McCaskell said, ‘I’m interested in you. But when I started digging around, I realized something: you’re renting that place to Mr Kennedy, but he doesn’t actually have a bank account. In fact, from what I can see here, he pretty much doesn’t have anything to his name at all. So you’re renting it to him, but he’s not paying you – or, at least, not through any banking system. There are no records of him at any of the utility companies, so he’s not paying rates either. He has no landline there at that cottage and no Internet. So who is he?’

  ‘What’s this got to do with Gary Kent?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I told you, I’m interested in you.’

  ‘I’m not that interesting, believe me.’

  ‘I disagree. I find you fascinating. I’ve looked at your cases, I’ve seen the things you’ve done, the accounts you’ve given to the police. You’re pretty unique, you know that? You’re smart, and you’re noble, and you’re daring, all the things that the public want to read about. I’m just not sure that’s all of it.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Everyone has secrets.’

  ‘I’m going now.’

  ‘Is Bryan Kennedy yours, Mr Raker? Is he your little secret?’

  I hung up.

  At the time, I was at Annabel’s, so I jumped straight in the car and drove from her house down to the cottage. When I was almost there, I got in touch with Kennedy at the hotel in Newcastle and told him what had happened.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘Stay where you are until I tell you otherwise.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Did you remember to grab your passport?’

  ‘You want me to go abroad?’

  ‘I want us not to go to jail.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I’ve got it here.’

  But there was something else in his voice.

  ‘Kennedy?’

  ‘Are you going to the house to clear my stuff out?’

  ‘That’s the general idea, yeah.’

  ‘So I can’t go back there?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  I heard him go to speak and then stop again.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied, too quickly. ‘Nothing’s the matter.’

  By then, I was at the cottage. I let myself in and pushed the door shut. It was cold, the heating off.

  ‘Don’t screw around,’ I said. ‘If there’s something going on, I need to know about it. McCaskell digging into you is both of our problems, remember that.’

  No response.

  ‘Kennedy?’

  ‘Don’t call me that. I hate that name.’

  ‘At this point, I couldn’t care less. What have you done?’

  He went to respond, to come back at me – an instinctive reaction to deny everything, built on years of practice – but then he stopped himself, as if the next lie had evaporated on his tongue.

  ‘I’ve found something,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  He hesitated for a moment more, like he was reaching for another lie, and then he seemed to accept that he’d been rumbled, that his lies were pointless. He had been forced to lie to everyone else he met in his life, pretending he was a fisherman called Kennedy. I was the only one he could tell the truth to.

  ‘It’s in the living room,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  He chose not to respond again.

  I walked across the kitchen and opened the living-room door, staring in at the furniture Dad had spent his last few years using. I wasn’t sure what Kennedy was talking about, or what I was supposed to be looking for – but then I saw.

  He’d pinned up newspaper cuttings, pages he’d torn out of books, photocopies from encyclopedias, printouts from web pages he must have accessed at the library. He’d stuck it all to the walls with masking tape, and had written all over it, underlining whole passages, words, photographs, titles. I tried to make sense of it, of the headlines and the pictures and the words I saw illuminated with highlighter pen, but I couldn’t.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ I said.

  ‘It’s why I’ve been asking you so much about your cases,’ Kennedy replied, his voice crackling along the phone line. ‘I needed to get my rhythm back. I needed to get a feel for this sort of work again.’

  ‘Are you insane?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said, cutting me off before I could say anything else. ‘No one knows who I am. No one. There’s no trail. All of this has come from the library. I haven’t made any calls. I don’t have the Internet. I don’t have a phone. The only way anyone ever finds out about the stuff on those walls is if you invite them into the house. Once you take it down and box it up, it’ll be forgotten.’

  I looked at the walls, feeling livid and panicked, uncertain of what to say. All of this put us at risk. Whatever he thought, however circumspect he’d been, it was dangerous. But there was also something absorbing and impress
ive about it, even oddly profound. It was like a man had returned from the afterlife. Before his career spiralled out of control, his family disintegrated around him, and he convinced the world he was dead, this was the detective I used to know.

  ‘What is this?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve found something.’

  I tried to make sense of the walls.

  ‘What do you mean, you’ve found something?’

  ‘I mean, this is big, Raker,’ he said. ‘What I’ve found, it’s really fucking big.’

  83

  Whatever Kennedy had found, however big a discovery he thought it might be, in those first four weeks it wasn’t big enough. His clothes, his belongings, the printouts and the photocopies, it all went into the attic as soon as I moved back home and, alone again, haunted by the idea of what had happened inside my house, I collapsed in on myself. I was incapable of finding the motivation to work, crestfallen inside the rooms that Gary Kent had corrupted. When I closed my eyes at night, all I saw was him and my wife. I was tortured by images of what might have happened, of Derryn struggling for air and him forcing his way on to the bed, his lips on hers.

  I couldn’t think of anything else.

  But then, one day, Field knocked on the door.

  I almost didn’t answer, couldn’t bring myself to have another conversation about Gary Kent, but then she leaned into the glass on the front door, cupped her hands to it and said, ‘Raker, I know you’re in there.’

  She looked at me when I opened the door and didn’t say anything, but I could tell what she thought of how I looked. I was broken, cleaved down the middle, and it showed in every line of my face, in the colour of my skin.

  ‘I’ve got something that belongs to you,’ she said.

  She was holding it in her hands.

  ‘I’m sorry we’ve had it for so long. It’s only just been released from evidence. If I’d known it was here, I would have told you at the start, but it totally passed me by.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, curious.

  ‘They found it in Kent’s home.’ She paused. I could hear her trying to find the right words. ‘He said he took it from Derryn in the last few weeks of her life. He got into the house five or six times during that period, and the first time, he said he went through the drawers of her bedside cabinet and …’

  She stopped.

  ‘And what?’ I said.

  ‘This is how he knew so much about you both – how he knew about the things you said when you were alone. She was going to leave it for you to find after she was gone.’ Her voice wavered a little. ‘Eventually, she just became too ill to continue, but before that, she was hiding it from you because she didn’t want to upset you. Kent says she hid it inside the covers of an old Eva Gainridge hardback.’

  I swallowed.

  ‘I’m so sorry, David. None of us should have got to read this before you.’

  ‘What did she leave me, Field?’

  ‘This.’

  She handed it to me.

  It was a hardcover A5 diary.

  I took it from her and a weight shifted from my body; a heaviness. I held it in my hands and opened it up. And as the pages fanned apart, I realized something: whatever he’d attempted to do, whatever he’d stolen from us, however much he’d tried to destroy me and to alter the narrative of our lives together, Kent wasn’t the man Derryn remembered at the end of her life. It didn’t matter that he was there in those final few days, it didn’t matter that he tried to manoeuvre his way between us, it didn’t matter what he said to her or what he didn’t. However hard he tried altering it, what I’d been to her, and what I remained, would never change.

  I was the person who married her.

  I was her husband.

  I was the one who had loved her, above all others, for sixteen years.

  David,

  These opening pages have been blank for a long time. I didn’t know how to introduce this diary, really. I started writing it after I found the first lump, two years ago, and then just carried on. I found it helped me clear my head. I found it cathartic. I’ve wanted to show it to you often, but for some reason it never quite felt like the right time.

  But things have changed now.

  I can’t leave these pages blank any longer.

  As I finally sit here and fill up these lines, you’re out on the back lawn. I can see you through the bedroom window – on your hands and knees, pulling dead flowers out of the beds – and I can tell you’ve been crying. I can see it in the redness at the corners of your eyes. That’s why you offered to go out there, even though you hate working in the garden, because you’re trying to stay strong for me. I love you for that. But today the news was hard for you to hear. I think today was when we looked at each other and we realized how little time we have left.

  Because, today, I told you I was stopping the treatment.

  I told you I couldn’t go through it any more. All the procedures and the medicines and the sickness: it’s just too much for me. And because of that, because I’ve made this decision, it means our journey – everything we’ve had together – is coming to an end. You and I, we don’t have decades any more. We don’t even have years.

  We have months.

  Throughout the rest of this notebook, you will find things we did and said that you remember. You will find things you might have forgotten. You will see things that I’ve written that you might recall differently. I doubt that there’s anything that you’ll seriously disagree with, but there might be. Over sixteen years, we would sometimes fall out (mostly about your terrible taste in music, ha ha) but those times were rare and barely register with me now, so I hope they didn’t linger long with you either.

  I hope you’ll look at these pages sometimes and you’ll think of me, but I hope – and you need to promise me this, Raker – you won’t become stuck. What we had was special, maybe so singular and extraordinary that it’s impossible to find again. But isn’t that the nature of all relationships, D? They’re all singular. They are all unique. Trying to find something exactly the same as what we had will be a fruitless search, and it will only make you unhappy. But trying to find something equally unique – that’s much easier. It’s as easy as talking to someone. So, in the years to come, don’t punish yourself, D. Think of me sometimes, but never punish yourself.

  After this, I will go back to writing in this diary, to filling in what I can about the days that pass. At some point over the next few months, I know I will stop, not because I want to, but because my body has given in and I no longer have a choice.

  It doesn’t matter, though.

  Even if I’d never written any of this, you’d know. You’d know that my love for you never faltered, never wandered, never greyed or wilted for a second. Whether these words existed or they didn’t, you’d know.

  Here at the end, D, you’d just know.

  You were my husband, my best friend, the absolute greatest thing that ever happened to me; you were the teller of the worst jokes known to man (and woman), and the guaranteed runner-up when we went jogging; you were always the loser at Trivial Pursuit, and always the winner at obscure movie trivia. You were handsome, and generous, and you could always make me laugh.

  I agreed to go out with you because I felt there was something different about you, something special. I married you in the knowledge that I was right and in the absolute belief that it would remain that way for as long as we were together. And now I’m leaving you knowing that all those things remain true. You have been my rock, my strength and my hope. You have become the foundation on which I’m built. Every day, every week, every year, you loved me, and I loved you back.

  And nothing will change, even after I’m gone.

  I will love you, always.

  My precious, wonderful husband.

  Derryn x

  Author’s Note

  For the purposes of the story, I’ve made some small changes to the working practices of UK police forces, in particular the Met. My hope is
that anything I’ve altered or adapted is done with care and is subtle enough not to cause any offence.

  Acknowledgements

  As with all my books, You Were Gone has been a truly collaborative effort, where I’ve leaned on a collection of brilliant and talented people to make me look loads better than I actually am.

  Chief among them are the amazing team at Michael Joseph, starting with my editor Maxine Hitchcock, who helped to craft, streamline and immeasurably improve the early drafts of the book, and who has been an incredible advocate for my writing ever since we began working together. Huge thank-yous are also due to Laura Nicol, Katie Bowden, Tilda McDonald, Chris Turner and the whole of the sales team, Aimie Price and the Production Department, Beatrix McIntyre in Editorial, Jon Kennedy who did such a brilliant job of designing the cover, and James Keyte and everyone in Audio. I’m sure there are people I’ve missed out (for which I apologize), but please know I’m so grateful for everything you do for me. Finally, a Raker book wouldn’t be a Raker book without the super-powered eagle eyes of my awesome copy-editor Caroline Pretty.

  Camilla Wray was, as she constantly is, an absolute rock when The Panic set in. Not only is she a fantastic agent, she’s also a wonderful person, a great friend and she pretends to laugh at my jokes. A Weaver-shaped thank-you is due to the gang at Darley Anderson too, including Mary, Emma, Kristina, Sheila, Rosanna and Roya.

  Thank you to Mick Confrey for his insight into being a detective, and for suggesting some of the ideas that formed the beginning of the novel. He pretends never to mind when I adapt (and sometimes just ignore) the actual rules of police work, because I think it serves the story better, so any mistakes in the novel are entirely my own.

  To Mum and Dad: I love you both so much. Thank you for everything. To my sister Lucy, creator of ‘Libraries’ and ‘Is it 1-4?’: you’re amazing, Ken. To the rest of my family and friends, both here and in South Africa: thank you for all your love and support. And to Sharlé, who I couldn’t do any of this without, and Erin, who assures me she’s old enough to read the books now (she isn’t), it’s hard to know what to say other than: you two are the best thing that ever happened to me.