Tim Weaver - Vanished

It was a tower block in Hammersmith, sitting in a patch of land between the flyover and the river. The call had come in from a neighbour who knew the occupant of Flat 312 and said she hadn’t seen him for three days. Ordinarily they’d chat in the corridors of the third floor every day when he returned from his job as a shop assistant. But the last time she saw him was the Tuesday before. She’d heard him leave for work, had even watched from her window as he headed off towards Hammersmith Tube station – but that was the last time she saw him. She thought she might have heard him come home that night, perhaps the sound of his door opening and closing, perhaps even the faint sound of conversation in the hallway, but she couldn’t say for sure. She definitely didn’t see him or hear him on Wednesday, and she hadn’t seen him since. It was now Friday night.

The tower block was perched on the edge of a grass bank that dropped down to a rusting fence and the train tracks beyond. It was one of five, all connected via walkways, all part of the same estate. If it hadn’t have been for the media, camped out in a space to his far left, light bulbs flashing, camera crews jostling for space, there might have been a strange kind of stillness to the place; a lack of light and sound, as if a pregnant hush were hanging in the air. In the walkways, in the alleyways, in the windows, Healy could make out figures – their faces freeze-framed in the glow from the police lightbars – looking on as things played out. At any other time, this was one of the most dangerous housing estates in London. He’d stood over bodies in this place. He’d knocked on doors and told parents their kids weren’t coming home. But now even the gangs and the dealers stood back and watched in silence as another came into this place.

One who was even worse than them.

After coming up the stairs – every light out, just like the others, bulbs smashed in the stairwell – he put on the forensic boiler suit, zipped it up and moved into the flat. Again, it was a carbon copy of the flats the other victims had lived in. Healy spotted Craw in the kitchen. There was a door off the living room, opening on to a bedroom. Chief Superintendent Ian Bartholomew stood in the doorway. Healy glanced at him but didn’t greet him. Bartholomew had started to get involved personally about four weeks after Joseph Symons went missing. ‘Three is three too many,’ he kept saying in daily briefings, as if no one on the task force felt anything for the men. Craw hated it; maybe hated him too. She’d never said as much to Healy, but her feelings were barely concealed: there, just below the surface, bubbling and stewing until one day in the future she would either say something she regretted to Bartholomew’s face, or she would walk into his office and hand in her resignation.

‘Melanie,’ Bartholomew said to Craw as she arrived from the kitchen. ‘What the bloody hell am I supposed to tell the media?’

Most of this, Healy knew, was down to him. Bartholomew had been there when Healy had been trying to find Leanne; and there in the aftermath, desperate not to give him a second chance. The decision to pull him on to the Snatcher case was Craw’s, and hers alone, and now she would be held accountable if it all went wrong: by Bartholomew, by Davidson, by anyone with a grudge against Healy. All Healy knew was that he owed it to her for giving him a chance – and he owed it to her not to make any mistakes.

Bartholomew backed out of the bedroom, letting Healy take in the crime scene, and stepped closer to Craw. ‘Melanie,’ he said again, using her first name to cushion the blow of what was coming next. ‘I think it’s time I took over the media briefings. This needs to come from the top. They need to see that we’re taking this seriously, and that we won’t just sit back and accept what we’ve got here tonight.’

‘With all due respect, sir, I’ve never put an impression across to the media that we weren’t taking these crimes seriously.’

‘Don’t take it personally,’ he said, holding up a hand to her, as if he’d barely heard her. ‘I have full faith in you and your …’ He paused, glancing at Healy. ‘ Team .’

‘Is there anything else you want to lead directly, sir?’

He looked at her, trying to find the insubordination in her face, but Craw looked at him blankly. ‘No. You carry on as is. I trust you. I’ll take the media hit.’

Bartholomew left.

Healy glanced at Craw, who looked back. There was nothing in her face, nothing unspoken. No indication that she thought any less of Bartholomew, even though he’d just relegated her from the front line of the case. He was happy for her to work the hours and feel the pressure build, but he wasn’t going to let her have her day in the sun if they ever caught the Snatcher. And yet she remained silent. Healy admired her even more for her poise.

He looked into the bedroom for a second time. The hair had been placed in a neat pile on the pillow. Just like Wilky. Just like Evans. Just like Symons.

‘What was this one’s name?’ Healy asked, looking at Craw.

‘Jonathan Drake,’ she said.

43

I shook my head as I flicked through Sam’s file. The picture of him was from the day of the fight at Gloucester Road, taken in the station afterwards when it looked like he was going to be charged. His face was puffy across the middle, where he’d been punched; traces of blood around his nose and a deep purple swelling on one cheekbone.

But there was nothing else in his record.

It was clean.

‘I just don’t see this,’ I said.

Healy nodded, as if he’d expected that reaction from me. ‘We turned up at his work and went through his computer. They assumed he wasn’t coming back, so they’d cleared out much of what was on his PC. But they didn’t clear out everything.’

As Healy slid a hand into the slip case, taking out the four matching Manila files, my mind rolled back to Investment International a couple of days before. I’d asked to go through his work PC myself, but McGregor, his boss, had wanted a warrant. I should have worked around it, should have got at his PC somehow – even though, at the time, I could never have imagined it would lead to this – and, as I silently cursed myself, Healy laid the files down in front of me. I knew what they were instantly.

The Snatcher victims.

He went to the second one down and opened it. A scrawny white man – no more than nineteen or twenty – looked out at me. It wasn’t official police photography; it was a shot in a living room, brightly lit but overexposed. The man was smiling, a crooked expression weighted to one side of his face in a shy, almost coy fashion. He was thin and wiry, a red T-shirt hanging off him, a pair of denims pulled tight at the waist, and he was perched on the edge of a sofa that was either about to fall apart or deliberately retro.

‘That’s the second,’ he said. ‘Marc Evans.’

Except, according to his file, he wasn’t called Marc Evans at all. That was just an alias; presumably the name most people he met and worked with in London knew him by. His real name was Marc Erion – and he was Albanian. Suddenly, I knew exactly where this was going as my mind flashed to Adrian Wellis, cut and covered in glass, looking up at me from the floor of the warehouse in Kennington. I set him up with a nice little Albanian kid. Fresh out of the fridge, this boy was. Nineteen, skinny, cute little tattoo on the back of his neck. I glanced at Erion’s personal details. Nineteen. Five-seven. Ten stone. A rose tattooed on to the back of his neck. Never registered at any port in the United Kingdom. Because he’d come into the country in the back of a lorry.

‘We estimate Erion, aka Evans, came into the country between March and October last year,’ Healy said. ‘His father was a politician back in the motherland, but Erion wasn’t what you’d call a chip off the old block. They didn’t talk much, mostly because Erion Jr was a Grade A fuck-up. Flunked college, flunked the job Daddy set him up with, got in with the wrong crowd and ended up stealing money from the family bank account to try and pay his way through his smack addiction. The old man booted him out and then Erion ended up getting in with an even wronger crowd, and some time last year he landed in the UK, most probably in the hands of the Albanian mafia.’