Michael Robotham - Lost

“Wednesday night.”

He nods.

I remember that night. I watched Rachel being interviewed on News at Ten . That's why she wasn't there when Mickey arrived home. A detective was posted at her flat but Mickey didn't get a chance to press the buzzer. My mind puts everyone where they should have been. Mentally I lift off the roof of Dolphin Mansions and put people inside or take them out. It's like playing with dolls in a dollhouse. Mrs. Swingler, Kirsten, Ray Murphy . . . I put Mickey outside, walking up the steps.

A piece is missing. Turning away from Eddie I walk across the courtyard toward Howard. The paramedics have strapped him to a gurney and are lifting him into the ambulance.

“What did you do on Wednesday evenings, Howard?”

He looks at me blankly.

“Before you went to prison. What did you do?”

He clears his throat. “Choir practice. I never missed a choir practice—not in seven years.”

There is a pause for the information to sink in—barely a heartbeat, even less, the pause between heartbeats. I have been a fool. I have spent so much time concentrating on finding Kirsten that I didn't see the other possibilities.

Moving away from them, I can see myself running into the street, whistling at cabs to stop. At the same time I yell into my cell phone, making no sense at all. I don't have all the facts. But I have enough. I know what happened.

The traces of hair dye on Mickey's towel have bothered me all along. Gerry Brandt didn't dye her hair and why would Howard bother with a detail like that?

“I don't pay for things twice,” Aleksei said. I know what that means now. He didn't organize Mickey's kidnapping but like Kirsten and Ray Murphy, he saw an opportunity. He wanted his daughter back—the only truly perfect thing he had ever created. So he paid the ransom in secret. No police and no publicity. And when Mickey arrived home that night it was Aleksei who intercepted her. He was waiting.

Then he hatched his plan—one that hinged on convincing the world that Mickey was dead. At first he imagined he could blame the kidnappers. He would take some of Mickey's blood or make her vomit, plant the evidence and encourage everyone to think that she had died at the hands of her abductors. Unfortunately, he didn't know who they were. Then something serendipitous happened—a made-to-measure suspect, with a corrupt sexuality and no alibi. Howard Wavell. The opportunity was almost too perfect.

And what of Mickey? He spirited her away—smuggling her out of the country, most likely on board his yacht. He changed her appearance and changed her name.

I don't know what Aleksei thought would happen then. Maybe one day, after enough years had passed, he planned to bring Mickey back to Britain with a new identity or perhaps he always intended to join her overseas.

The plan might have been flawless but for Gerry Brandt, a washed-up, drug-addled chancer, who thought he could steal apples from the same tree all over again. Having squandered the first ransom, he came back to Britain with a plan to do it all again. Mickey's body had never been found and he still had a few strands of her hair and her swimsuit. Kirsten knew immediately that Gerry was back in the country. She talked to Ray Murphy. Gerry's greed and stupidity threatened to expose them.

Unbeknownst to them, he also threatened to destroy Aleksei's grand design. The world believed Mickey was dead. A second ransom demand called this into question. It must also have created a separate, more dangerous doubt in Aleksei's mind. Did these people know ?

The only way to safeguard his secret completely was to silence them. He would pay the ransom, follow the trail and have everyone killed. I gave him the perfect alibi; he was following me.

These thoughts are coming almost too quickly to put in any order or chronology but like Sarah, Mickey's friend, on that first morning at Dolphin Mansions—“I know what I know.”

“New Boy” Dave is on the other end of the phone.

“Have you found Aleksei?”

“His motor yacht arrived in Oostende in Belgium at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning.”

“Who was on board?”

“Still no word.”

I can hear the rasp of my own breathing. “You have to listen to me! I know I've made a lot of mistakes but this time I'm right. You have to find Aleksei. You can't let him disappear.”

I pause. He's still on the phone. The only thing we have in common now is Ali. Maybe that's enough. “You have to check the passenger manifests of every ferry and hovercraft and the Eurostar train services out of Waterloo. You can forget about the airlines. Aleksei doesn't fly. You'll need warrants for his house, office, cars, lockups, boatsheds . . . And you'll want his phone records and details of bank transactions going back three years.”

Dave is starting to lose patience with me. He doesn't have the authority to do half of these things and Campbell and Meldrum won't listen to anything I say.

Leaning back, I stare out of the window of the cab not actually seeing anything but I'm turning pages in my head full of notes, diagrams and figures; searching through the past for a clue.

When I did my detective training a guy called Donald Kinsella took me under his wing. Donald had spent years working undercover and wore his hair long, tied back in a ponytail and he had a bushy mustache, which was a trademark for coppers in the seventies until the Village People made it a different sort of trademark.

“Keep it simple,” was his motto. “Don't believe in conspiracy theories. Listen to them, work out the odds, and then file them in the same drawer as you put stuff you read in the Socialist Worker or on the Daily Telegraph editorial pages.”

Donald believed the truth lay somewhere in the middle. He was a pragmatist. When Diana, Princess of Wales, died in Paris he rang me. He'd retired by then.

“A year from now there will be a dozen books about this,” he said. “People will be blaming the CIA, MI5, the PLO, the Mafia, Osama bin Laden, another shooter on the grassy knoll—you name it. There will be secret witnesses, missing evidence, mystery vehicles, stolen reports, tire marks, poisonings and pregnancies . . . Let me tell you the one thing I can guarantee won't be in any of these books—the most likely answer. People want to believe conspiracies. They eat them up and say, ‘Please can I have some more?' They don't want to think that someone close to them or someone famous could die a mundane, ordinary, kitchen-sink sort of death.”

What Donald was trying to say is that lives are complicated but most deaths aren't. People are complicated but not their crimes. Prosecutors and psychologists care about motives. I care about facts—the how, where, what and when, rather than the why. My favorite is “who,” the perpetrator—the face that fills my empty picture frame.

Eddie Barrett is wrong. All truth isn't a lie. I'm not naïve enough to believe the opposite, but facts I can hold on to. Facts I can write up in a report. Facts are more reliable than memories.

The cabdriver is staring at me in his mirror. I'm talking to myself.

“The second sign of madness,” I explain.

“What's the first one?”

“Killing lots of people and eating their genitals.”

He laughs and sneaks another look at me.

Three hours ago I learned that Mickey Carlyle might still be alive. Twenty-four hours ago Aleksei's boat arrived in Oostende. He has a head start but will only travel overland. He might already be there. Where?

The Netherlands is a possibility. He and Rachel lived there and Mickey was born in Amsterdam. Eastern Europe is more likely. He has connections and maybe even family.