Tim Weaver - Vanished

Silence.

‘There’s something going on with him,’ he said finally.

‘With Davidson?’

‘Yeah. He doesn’t say anything to me now.’

‘As opposed to?’

‘As opposed to baiting me every bloody day. If they’d left me alone, I wouldn’t have tried to shut them down. But since Sallows got the boot, Davidson’s hardly said anything to me. Not directly. It’s like I don’t exist any more.’

‘You exist. He must have some other plan.’

‘Like what?’

I was about to say I didn’t know, but then I recalled something in Healy’s face the day before, a hint of sadness, of suppression. I thought at the time that it might be a secret he was keeping, unrelated to the case.

‘You got any chinks in your armour?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean by that?’

He’s not going to play ball . ‘I mean, have they got anything they can come at you through? Davidson’s not going to outsmart you on police work, but he’s not stupid. I’ve met Craw. She’s clever. Watchful. She’s not going to have her head turned by a guy like him. She doesn’t care about the crap he’s spinning for her. Maybe she’s watching you more closely, maybe she isn’t, but if she is it’s not because of him, it’s because you’ve set off alarm bells in her head about something. Spun a lie she doesn’t believe.’

‘She thinks you and me are working together.’

‘Do you think that’s all it is?’

Another small pause.

‘Healy?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually, and as I looked down at the phone I felt a bubble of anxiety. Not for me. I could handle it if the police turned up on my doorstep, if they found out I’d completely disregarded their wishes and continued to search for Sam Wren. It was Healy I felt uneasy for. He was lying to me, the only person he could trust, and if he was lying to me, it meant he had something he was willing to protect. And in my experience of him, that meant he was planning on doing something stupid.

‘Be careful, Healy.’

‘About what?’

‘About whatever you’re protecting.’

He didn’t respond. The line drifted a little, and I could hear more cars. A horn. He was calling me on a public phone so there was no trace of contact between us. It had been the same every time: every call to me had been from a random central London number. It was so typically Healy: on the one hand, he had the clarity of purpose not to leave a trace of himself; on the other, it was likely he was harbouring some rash and foolish plan.

‘You still want to find your man?’ he said after a while.

‘Of course I do.’

‘Then meet me at King’s College Hospital at twelve.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s where the girl on the DVDs is.’

62

King’s College Hospital was sandwiched between Coldharbour Lane and Denmark Hill, about two and a half miles south of the river, and it was a building I didn’t have a single good memory of. In my days as a journalist, one of my sources had bled out in A&E after being stabbed in the chest. Then, four years later, Derryn and I had sat together in the oncology department, waiting for a second opinion we hoped would change the course of our lives. It didn’t. The second opinion was the same as the first, except delivered with none of the tact, and when we left, we left the hospital system for good and she died six months later. I hoped my third time would be better, hoped it would bring some small glimmer of light – but given what I’d seen on the DVDs of Pell, and how the girl had looked when I’d found her in Adrian Wellis’s loft space, I wasn’t holding out much hope.

Healy was waiting in the car park at the rear of the campus. As I swung the BMW into a space, I killed the engine and watched him in the rear-view mirror for a moment. He was scanning his surroundings, eyes everywhere, trying to see if anyone had followed him here. He probably had good reason to be suspicious, but there was a look on his face, a mixture of anguish and paranoia, which he’d have to lose if we were going to get anywhere with the girl.

We walked across the car park, light rain drifting from right to left, and headed inside. The corridors were cool and smelt faintly of boiled food and industrial-strength cleaner, even though every window and door was open for as far as the eye could see. The intensive-care unit was on the other side of the campus, so we followed the signposts through the bowels of the hospital, neither of us talking, just moving silently from one end to the other. About twenty feet short of the ICU front desk, Healy took me aside and brought me up to date.

‘She opened her eyes for the first time yesterday,’ he said, ‘but she’s still pretty screwed up. Cheekbones and nose were smashed in, and one of her ears has been torn. Plus she has all the cuts and bruises you’d expect a woman to have after being kept in a loft and raped repeatedly by a couple of fucking animals.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Marika.’

I nodded, and let Healy lead the way.

Marika Leseretscu was at the end of a long ward, the smell of food and cleaning products giving way to the oppressive tang of sickness. Outside her door stood a young, uniformed officer, an empty seat next to him with his hat perched on it and his jacket over the back.

‘Morning,’ Healy said to the officer.

‘Morning.’

He got out his warrant card. ‘I’m DC Healy.’

The officer nodded, and his eyes fell on me.

‘This is …’ Healy paused, just for a second, and I realized he’d tried to think of a cop who might have accompanied him here, who might have wanted to partner with him, and he couldn’t think of anybody. Not one person. ‘This is James Grant, our psychologist.’

I nodded at the officer.

He was young, which worked in our favour. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘We’d like a few minutes alone with the girl,’ Healy said, and moved us towards the room. The officer stood aside and we headed in and closed the door.

The room was tiny: twenty feet across, with one partially open window, a faded painting on the wall above her bed, and a cream-coloured bedside cabinet. She was propped up on some puffy white pillows, but asleep. Next to her an ECG beeped, and a metal stand held an IV drip. She was wearing a nightdress stamped with the hospital’s logo, and her face was almost entirely covered in bandaging. I could see her eyes, both of them closed; and, through the clear plastic of the ventilator helping her breathe, her mouth showed. Nothing else. A spot of blood had soaked through at her right ear.

I stepped in closer to the bed, and then noticed Healy. In the depressed light of the room, it looked like he had tears in his eyes. Sometimes I struggled to read or understand a single thing about him, but in that moment, as he looked down at the girl beaten and broken in front of us, I thought I understood where his head was at: Leanne.

‘Healy,’ I said gently, and he looked at me. There was nothing in his face. ‘I need you to tell me what else is going on.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t want you doing anything stupid.’

He didn’t answer.

‘Has it got something to do with Leanne?’

His body shifted, some of the rigidity leaving it as if a part of him had deflated – as if he’d been found out – but as he went to answer, as I readied myself for what was to come, the girl moved on the bed between us, the sheets tightening around her legs.

And she opened her eyes.

63

She looked between us, her brain trying to make the connections. Earlier, she’d gone to sleep surrounded by nurses. Now she was waking up to find two men she didn’t know standing next to her bed. She immediately moved, trying to protect herself, turning on to her side and bringing her legs up into the foetal position. I felt a pang of sadness for her, felt the burn of anger too, but as I looked across at Healy, expecting to see the same, I instead saw a strange kind of stillness in him, as he retreated back eight months.