Tim Weaver - Vanished

A moment of confusion.

I started to get up, hand flat to the mud path.

And then a boot swung out of the dark, not even there until it was inches in front of my face, and as I tried desperately to avoid it, the steel toecap connected with the bridge of my nose – and I thumped back violently against the ground for a second time.

And this time I blacked out.

When I came round again, I was still in the same place. My head felt like it was on fire, pain in the bridge of my nose, in my forehead, around my eyes. I touched a finger to my face. My nose wasn’t broken, but I could feel wet blood all down my lips and over my chin.

Getting on to all fours and then slowly, unsteadily, to my feet, I headed back the way I’d come in, eventually hitting the light. It was starting to cool off now, or maybe I was just so coated in cold mud that it only felt that way. As I stood there, wiping the blood and the dirt from my skin, dizziness hit me and a wave of nausea swept through my system. I put a hand to my mouth, trying to push it down, and as I did I realized the smell of the staffroom was still clinging to the inside of my throat, to my mouth and nose.

A second wave hit me – and this time I was sick.

When I was done, I wiped my mouth and looked back into the darkness of the tunnel. Pell . If he’d been using the staffroom, he’d been using it for something bad. The room may have been empty, but the smell of death remained, and so did the evidence of suffering. He knew the line. He knew how to navigate it, how to keep its secrets from people, how to use it against me. And he’d be long gone by now.

But even as I realized that, even as I saw the logic in it, a weird feeling passed over me.

Like someone was still watching.

Pell hadn’t returned to his house, although I hadn’t expected him to. I walked down his driveway to the tap and turned it on, washing my face with the lukewarm water. I rinsed off the mud, leaving great big wet patches on my jeans, and then I took off my T-shirt and turned it inside out. It masked some of the bloodstains; enough, at least, not to turn heads on the train ride home. Then, finally, I scrubbed down my boots. When I was done, I turned the tap off and stood there, watching the water run into the gaps between the patio slabs. But even washed down, I could still smell the room on me.

The blood and the death.

In my clothes, in the thread and the stitching.

In my skin.

51

For the first time in months, I dreamed. I was hiding behind a door in the bedroom, only able to see two ways: right, through the gap between door and frame; and left to Derryn’s old dresser, where the mirror reflected back the door and the hallway beyond.

In the darkness of the hallway I could see shapes: figures, one queued behind the other, waiting to enter the bedroom. At first a feeling passed over me – the kind of sixth sense you only gain in dreams – and I told myself, They’re the people you’ve found; the men, the women, the kids, all of them tracked down, brought home and returned to the light .

But then one of the shapes moved away from the group.

And I realized they weren’t those people at all.

When I woke, my whole body was slick with sweat, the sheets beneath me wet, the duvet twisted around my legs and my stomach like a cocoon. I kicked it off, sat up and then remained there, perched on the edge of the bed, my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands. Behind me, I felt Liz stir. She made a soft sound, a gentle exhalation, and then her fingers were brushing the small of my back. ‘Are you okay, baby?’ she said quietly.

I nodded and looked at the clock: 1.21 a.m.

Her fingers moved across my skin. ‘You’re soaking. Were you dreaming?’

I turned and looked at her in the darkness of the bedroom. Behind her, the curtains weren’t fully drawn and moonlight poured through the gap in a thin sliver the shape of a knife blade. It fell against her skin, her body and part of her face. She was so different from Derryn, our relationship so different, and yet for a moment they were both the same: the person I shared my life with – but not the things I’d seen, or the things I’d done.

‘Yes,’ I said, taking her hand. I shifted back into the darkness, where she couldn’t see my bruises. The less she saw of them, the longer we went without having to discuss my work, and why I did what I did.

‘What was the dream about?’

‘Just a …’ I stopped myself and looked at her again. How do I tell you everything I’ve done? I brought her into me and we sat there in silence, and then, after a while, I felt her breath on my neck, her face turned to me, still waiting for an answer. ‘I dreamed about some of my cases,’ I said finally. ‘About the men I’ve hunted.’

She looked at me, eyes narrowing slightly, as if she was searching for the lie. I’d told them to her before, out of nothing more than a need to protect her from the truth – from discovering a man she knew nothing about – and she’d seen right through them. But I must have been convincing enough this time because she dropped her head back against my chest and squeezed me. I felt my heart swell up with guilt, but let it go. She couldn’t know what I’d really dreamed of, because if I told her the truth, she’d realize I’d deceived her. She’d defended me as a solicitor, and supported me as her partner, but I’d only ever told her enough to get me off. She didn’t know every detail about the killers I’d tracked.

And nothing of the bodies I’d put in the ground.

The people in the hallway had been those killers, and they’d been those bodies, waiting in line to enter the bedroom. The hiding spot I’d used in the dream had been the same spot I’d used once, back at the start, when one of them had come to my home in the middle of the night to kill me. I understood why I’d returned to that hiding place in the dream and I understood why those men – the ones now in prison, and the ones who were nothing more than bones and earth – had come to me. They were my memories. The men who’d tried to walk me to my grave. The men who’d attacked me, shot at me and tortured me.

And right at the back, behind the devils and executioners, had been someone else. A deep unease had slithered through my stomach as I watched him – an ominous feeling, spreading fast like an oil spill – and even though I told myself it was a dream, felt the unreality of it, I couldn’t pull myself out. It was like I was drowning. I just gasped for air, desperately trying to reach for the surface, and became frightened in a way I hadn’t been for a long time. And all the time, the man just stood there, looking into the room at me.

Hood up. No face.

Just darkness.

PART FOUR

52

When I woke the next morning, the sun was gone. Through the gap in the curtains, all I could see was swollen grey cloud and rain spitting against the windows, breaking into lines and running the length of the glass. I returned to Pell’s place in Highgate, found a parking space just up from the entrance, and sat there and waited. It was harder to be inconspicuous on a Sunday: even though it was raining, the clouds a granite grey, the gutters swirling with dead leaves and water, people passed the car frequently, on walks, with dogs on leashes, heading to the park or down the road to the Tube station. I tried my best to make it look like I was busy: I opened and closed the glovebox when people walked past, polished the dashboard with an old rag, got out to open the boot and look through it. But eventually, as lunch came and went and Pell still hadn’t returned, I gave up and just sat there. The house remained the same as it had been the day before: fewer shadows because there was no sun, but its windows no less dark.