Tim Weaver - Vanished

It was totally at odds with how Julia had described that last half-year: she’d said he’d become distant and highly strung, that he was never home until she was in bed.

‘Did he ever mention anyone called Ursula Gray to you?’

‘Who?’

‘Ursula Gray.’

A blank look and then a shake of the head. ‘No.’

As Werr headed back to his desk, I felt a pang of sadness for Julia Wren: she was paying me to find her husband with what little money she had left, unaware of the lies he’d told and the secrets he’d taken with him. I needed to find out who Ursula Gray was, because that was what Julia had – indirectly – asked me to do. And once I had the answer, I would be closer than ever to finding out why Sam left. But if he’d been having an affair, there would be no happy ending for Julia Wren.

19

16 February | Four Months Earlier

‘What is it you wanted to see me about, Healy?’

Healy looked across the desk at DCI Craw, and then out through a glass panel to the CID office beyond her. It was seven in the evening and no one had gone home. Detectives were at workstations, talking to each other or on the phone, solemn expressions on every face. Some were facing the map of London at the other end of the office, red pen marking out key areas and coming off in lines to photocopies and Post-it notes. At the very top, the photographs of the two missing men: Wilky and Evans.

‘Healy?’

‘I wanted to talk to you about my role here, ma’am.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

‘I wanted to see if I could be of more use to you.’

‘In what way?’

He glanced out into the CID office and then back to Craw. ‘I understand there are people who don’t think I should be here,’ he said to her, and as she shifted in her seat, coming forward, he could smell a hint of citrus on her. ‘And I know, with the greatest of respect, ma’am, that you’re probably one of them.’

She frowned. ‘Don’t second-guess me, Healy.’

‘I wasn’t –’

‘You don’t know what my position is. I’ve never made that clear.’

He nodded. ‘I just wanted to tell –’

‘No, let me tell you a few things,’ she said, leaning on her desk and dragging a mug of tea across to her. ‘You’re – what? Forty-seven?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And you’ve been on the force how long?’

‘Twenty-six years.’

She leaned back in her seat again and pulled open the top drawer of her desk. A second later she dropped a file down in front of her. It was Healy’s. ‘This,’ she said, pointing to the file, ‘is why a lot of people don’t think you should be here.’ She let the pages of the file fall past her thumb, a waterfall of paper passing across her skin. ‘When you went looking for your daughter off the books, when you teamed up with a civilian, when you waved a gun in another officer’s face, you took twenty-six years of your career and pissed it up against the wall.’

She looked at him from under the ridge of her brow, as if waiting for a reaction. He wasn’t going to give her one. Instead, he just focused on her face, on not breaking her gaze. He’d spent the last thirty-eight days batting off questions and taunts; trying to prove he could restrain himself, that he regretted his actions, that he was someone different now. But the truth was, he wasn’t different.

And he didn’t regret anything.

He didn’t regret going after the piece of shit that took his girl, and he didn’t regret going up against the cops who tried to stop him. He could play their games now, he could act how they wanted him to, but it would never change how he felt: he could never forgive cops like Davidson and Sallows for trying to get in the way of him finding Leanne. In their eyes, he was some sort of heretic: the traitor, the back-stabber, the man who showed no contrition about the things he’d done. To him, they were even less than that. If they hated him, he hated them more.

‘Are you too old to change, Colm?’

He looked at her. Her voice was softer now, and the change threw him for a moment. ‘No, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe I am.’

‘Are you going to make me look like an arsehole?’

‘In what way, ma’am?’

‘If I give you a little rope,’ she said, eyes fixed on him, same expression on her face, ‘if I give you a little rope, are you going to hang me with it?’

He studied her. She was quite attractive – slate-grey eyes, a face full of sharp angles – but she gave off the air of not being too particular about how she looked. Her hair was short, tucked behind her ears and swept across her forehead at the front. It was a haircut built for practicality, for the job, just like everything else: grey trouser suit, and no jewellery apart from a thin wedding band and an even thinner gold chain.

‘Healy?’

He looked out to where Davidson was sitting at one of the computers. When Healy turned back to Craw, she’d swivelled in her seat, following his line of sight.

‘If you give me a chance, ma’am, I will show you what I can do.’

Craw’s eyes were fixed on Davidson, who was up and moving around the office. ‘He outranks you now. How does that make you feel?’

‘It doesn’t make me feel anything, ma’am.’

She smiled. ‘I’m new in this station but I know a little of your history, and I think we can safely say that your best days were a few years back.’ She reached forward to a picture frame on the desk – one facing away from Healy – and turned it so he could see. It contained a photo of her, with two teenage girls. ‘I don’t condone what you did, but I get it. Someone takes something from you, you have to claim it back. Until you’ve had kids, you don’t understand that.’ He tried not to show his surprise, but she must have seen a change in his face: she nodded once, as if to tell him he’d heard correctly, but then caution filled her eyes. ‘Like I said, though – I don’t condone it. You were rash and you were stupid. You put people’s lives at risk, as well as your own.’

Silence settled across the office. She rocked gently back and forth in her seat, her eyes moving to a second window, which looked out over the station car park. In the darkness, snow was falling, passing under the fluorescent orange glow of the security lights. When the wind picked up, flakes were blown in against the glass, making a soft noise like fat crackling in a pan.

‘What’s your personal situation now?’

‘Personal situation, ma’am?’

‘Are you still with your wife?’

‘I’m not sure I understand the relevance of –’

‘Are you still with her?’

Healy paused. ‘No. We’re separated.’

Craw eyed him. ‘This isn’t the speech the chief super wants me to make to you. It’s probably not the speech most of them out there want me to make to you either. But I’ve watched you over the past month and a half, and – even before you came to me today – I’d been thinking about how we could better harness what skills you have. I needed to see that you were prepared to keep your head down. I needed to see that you were willing to show restraint.’ She paused; eyed him. ‘Truth is, we’re short on numbers and we’re in need of experience. So if I give you some rope, the fewer distractions you have, the less you have to go home to, the better it is for me.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘But if you make me look like an arsehole, even once …’

‘I won’t.’

A long silence and then she snapped his file shut. ‘What do you know about the Snatcher?’

He looked out into the office, to the cops working the case and then to the two faces on the wall above the corkboard. ‘Two victims so far. Steven Wilky and Marc Evans. He takes them from their houses at night. No bodies. No trace of the victims.’