Tim Weaver - Vanished

Somewhere, somehow, I’d managed to lose Sam.

As I got to Hammersmith for the second time with no further sign of Sam, the house was starting to get dark. I glanced at the clock: 9.30. I was fried. I closed the footage and shut down the Mac, then showered. As the cool water ran down my face, my mind rolled back once again to what I’d seen, and then over everything Julia Wren had said earlier. I didn’t need to have seen him on the footage to move things on: I already had Sam’s work, his brother and the obvious loss of weight. The case was already shifting, and would do so with or without the recording. But the video was a useful starting point and, in an odd way, a symbolic one; a means of zeroing in on Sam’s physical location that day, and – in the moment he exited the train, wherever that might have been – a way to get inside his head.

By choosing a station to leave at, he would have given me a compass bearing for that area of the city, and while it might not have led me to him, it would have given me an advantage. But most of all it would have helped erase the impossible: that a man really could step on to a train and then – three stops later – disappear into thin air.

12

As I entered Liz’s house there was the smell of coffee and perfume and the buzz of the electric shower along the hallway. Her living room was understated but stylish: an open fireplace, two black leather sofas, a TV, a huge bookcase; and then a potted palm, big and out of control, which looked like it belonged on a Caribbean island.

I went to the kitchen, got two mugs from the cupboard and poured some coffee, then padded through to the bedroom. She’d finished showering and was drying herself off, steam pouring off her, condensation on every surface. I announced my arrival by singing the Psycho shower-scene music.

She smiled. ‘Very funny.’

‘It’s like a volcano in here.’

Rolling her eyes, she hung her towel on the door, and started hunting around in her drawers for underwear.

‘How was your day?’ I asked.

‘I was defending that hit-and-run driver.’

She looked at me, her opinion on him clear to see. Even outside of the courtroom, in the privacy of her own home, she maintained a kind of dignified silence. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to discuss her cases with me, more that she preferred not to judge people, even if sometimes – like tonight – it was hard not to. I liked that quality in her.

‘And yours?’

‘It was okay.’

She looked at me. ‘Just okay?’

I put her coffee down and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘So this guy I’m trying to find gets on at Gloucester Road and then disappears. Just …’ I looked at her. It sounded strange saying it out loud. ‘Vanishes.’

‘How do you vanish from the inside of a train?’

I shrugged. ‘That’s just the point. You don’t. You can’t . He must have got off at some point – but I can’t see where. I’ve been over the footage twice today.’

‘No sign of him?’

‘Nothing after Victoria.’

‘He’ll turn up.’ She sat down on the bed and squeezed me, then shifted slightly, as if she’d suddenly remembered something. ‘Oh, I bumped into an old friend of yours today.’

‘I didn’t realize I had any left.’

Another smile formed on her face. ‘He was giving evidence in one of the other courtrooms.’

‘Who was the friend?’

‘Colm Healy.’

His name made me pause.

The last time I’d seen Healy was at the funeral of his daughter the previous November. He’d been in a bad way at the time: emotionally damaged, physically broken, estranged from his wife and suspended from his job at the Met. In the weeks before he buried his girl, we’d formed an uneasy alliance, one built not on trust, but on necessity, as we both came to realize we were hunting the same man.

‘Did you say hello?’

‘Yes. He passed on his best.’

‘Is he back on the force?’

‘Since 9 January. He said he’d had to suck up a demotion.’

‘But he seemed okay otherwise?’

Liz looked up at me. ‘He seemed better.’

He couldn’t have been much worse. Healy had gone against all the rules of his profession to find his daughter. In the interviews afterwards, police had accused me of feeling a kinship for him, using it as a stick to beat me with, a way of cornering me. But they’d failed to understand the relationship. We’d caught a monster – a murderer who’d eluded police for years – and, in order to do that, in order to go as far as we had, there had to be something deeper tethering us to each other. The police thought it was that I felt sorry for him.

But it was more than that.

Until you’d buried the most important person in your life, it was difficult to understand how grief forged a connection between people. Yet, ultimately, that was what had happened with Healy and me. I didn’t trust him, in many ways didn’t even really like him, but we each saw our reflection in the other, and – as we tried to stop a killer who had preyed on us both – that had been enough.

13

23 January | Five Months Earlier

The grass around the front of the building was still covered in frost and, in the sky above, unmarked by cloud, a pair of seagulls squawked, drifting beyond the walls of the prison. There was a faint breeze in the air, carried in from the Thames, but otherwise it was still.

Healy passed through the front entrance and waited in line at security. Ahead of him, a man in his seventies was being patted down, a prison officer’s hands passing along both legs. The old man’s coat, jacket, belt and shoes were already sitting in a tray on the other side of an X-ray machine, and – once he was done being searched – he had a door-shaped metal detector to contend with. A second prison officer lay in wait beyond that, looking like he’d come off the same production line as the one doing the rub-down: shaved head, moustache, semi-aggressive.

The old man was still putting on his shoes by the time Healy was done. In the corridor ahead were a series of lockers where visitors were asked to store all personal possessions. Healy made a show of switching off his phone, and opened one of the locker doors. But he didn’t put anything inside.

He wasn’t planning on staying.

A couple of minutes later, as he pretended to check his phone, he saw her emerge through a security door. She was wearing a visitor’s badge on her front and holding a slip case. As he watched her, he felt a prickle of anger form at the bottom of his throat, but then she seemed to sense she was being watched and looked vaguely in his direction. He stepped in front of the open locker door and disappeared from view.

A few seconds later, he leaned back out and saw that she was chatting with one of the prison guards. There was a smile on her face that pissed Healy off, as if nothing was on her mind. As if she’d forgotten where she’d just come from and who she’d been talking to. He’d missed her the week before because she’d been finished by the time he’d fought his way through London traffic – but he hadn’t missed her this week. He’d made sure of that.

Now he needed to get to know her.

He needed to get a fix on her routines, her habits, her quirks, her route into and out of this place.

And when he knew all that, when he was sure, then he’d move in for the kill.

An hour later, Healy pulled his Vauxhall up outside the station. He killed the engine and glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror. He’d hardly slept the night before, knowing he was due at the prison early, and it showed in his eyes and in his face. He’d told Craw that he was going to the doctor, and maybe she’d believe that for a while. But she was smart. She’d see it in him. And, after a while, she’d realize it wasn’t a lack of sleep that was getting to him. It was the anger and resentment.