Tim Weaver - Vanished

Something had been up with Smart .

‘He’s not in any trouble,’ I said. ‘I just need to speak to him.’

She cleared her throat. ‘He’s out for the rest of the day.’

‘Out on the line?’

‘No. He’s doing a half-day.’

‘He’s on holiday?’

‘Well, it’s 18 June.’

‘What’s the significance of that?’

‘He always takes 18 June off. It’s the anniversary.’

‘Of what?’

A pause. ‘Of his dad dying.’

I was heading along Uxbridge Road, waiting for Spike to call me back with an address for Smart. He was exdirectory, with no trail on the internet. No Facebook page. No Twitter feed. No LinkedIn profile. No stories about him in local newspapers. None of the usual ways people left footprints. But as the woman at Gloucester Road told me about his father, something shifted into focus and, as it formed in my head, I pulled a turn into a side road and bumped up onto the pavement in order to let it come together.

I leaned into the phone. ‘What did his dad die of?’

‘What?’

‘Do you know what his dad died of?’

‘Uh … cancer.’

I killed the call and sat back in my seat.

Whatever he was doing with the men after he took them, he was doing because of what his dad had done to him. You didn’t need to be a profiler to work that out. Killers were made, not born; the cycles of abuse rippled through from one generation to the next. But I imagined that when, in Edwin Smart’s childhood, the abuse – in whatever form it got dished out – finally stopped, it was because his father got cancer. And when his father got cancer, he was left with no hair.

Just like the Snatcher victims.

He shaved their heads to make them like his father.

Daddy

Jonathan Drake woke with a jolt. Darkness all around him, everywhere, in every corner of whatever space he was being kept in. He’d been moved again. Every time he slept, he was shifted around the room. Most times he was conscious of it happening, but he didn’t do anything about it. He was too scared. He just lay there, limp, as the man slid fingers under his naked body, as hands pinched his skin – the feel of them sending goosebumps scattering across Drake’s body – and he pretended he was asleep. It was safer not to fight. Sometimes, though, he wouldn’t know he’d been moved until he woke up. He imagined those times the man had drugged him. Then, when Drake felt in the darkness for the things around him he’d become familiar with, and instead realized there was nothing he could seek comfort in, panic would spread through his body.

He was face down on the floor this time, stomach in a patch of something wet, ankle bound to the wall behind him. He just lay there, looking off into the dark, trying to force his eyes to form shapes in front of him. But there was nothing, just like every other time. He closed his eyes and listened. He could hear something faintly, but whatever it was it wasn’t coming from outside. The only noises that drifted around the room were those from inside it: the soft sound of electricity, and water dripping rhythmically somewhere close by. Sometimes he listened to the sound and used it to focus his mind, wondering how long he’d been kept here, and what was to come.

‘I never got the chance to start on you.’

Drake moved instantly, up off the floor, scampering back towards the wall on all fours. And then he sat there, knees up at his chest, scanning the darkness. He couldn’t see the man anywhere, but he was there. The voice had sounded like it was right on top of him.

‘Jonathan Drake.’

Drake looked from left to right, desperately trying to seek the man out, his heart clubbing against his chest so hard it felt like it might bruise. Then, on his right, light suddenly erupted about twenty feet away from him. Drake automatically pushed back, reacting to the sudden change, but he was already tight to the wall, unable to go any further. He looped his arms around his knees and squeezed even harder, trying to form a protective barrier.

Then Drake saw the man.

There was no light directly on him, just a weak glow, but Drake could make out a head, a shoulder, part of a body, and a big hand sitting across the torch, turning it gently back and forth so that an arrow of light swung across the floor of the room, side to side.

‘Jonathan is such a lovely name,’ the man said, and Drake – just for a moment – thought how ordinary he sounded. No accent. No twang. A softness to his voice that was almost as frightening as if he’d been screaming. ‘My father was also called Jonathan.’

Drake swallowed. ‘Please. Please don’t –’

‘They used to call me “Ed Case” at school.’ A snort of laughter. ‘I was always in trouble. Fighting, causing problems, answering back. I remember getting caned fourteen times once, right across the knuckles, because I told a teacher to fuck off. I guess that’s what happens when you grow up without a mother. She died when I was one, so the old man brought me up. I sometimes wonder if life would have turned out differently if she’d lived. Maybe it would. Or maybe she would also have locked me in the cellar, beaten me senseless, climbed into my bed and made me touch her, like he did.’ The man stopped rolling the torch. ‘Do you know what I don’t understand, Jonathan?’

‘Look, whatever you want –’

‘Shut your fucking mouth.’

Nothing in the man’s voice. No emotion. No volume. But there was something about him, about his stillness, that sent a chill fingering up Drake’s spine.

‘Do you know what I don’t understand?’ he repeated.

Silence. Drake didn’t answer this time.

‘When I had to take him into hospital for his treatment, when I had to do his shopping, change the TV channel for him, read to him and put him to bed, I looked at him and felt devastated by the thought that he might not be around any more. And yet, when I wasn’t with him, this deep, burning hatred was just eating me up inside.’

Drake looked around him. The glow from the torch had turned the light up just a notch, but it was still hard to make anything out. When he turned back to the man, he was staring at Drake, eyes black, face cast in strips of shadow.

‘It was a different time back then.’

Drake pressed himself against the wall again.

‘No one spoke about those things. I never told anyone what he did to me. What he made me into.’ He started rolling the torch back and forth. ‘A fucking queer.’

And then he stopped.

For the first time, Drake noticed the man was gripping something in his other hand, fingers around it, surface shining dully in the muted light. Oh shit. He had a knife. Drake tried to move away, tried to shift sideways, but the shackles tightened, and all he could do was look at the man, his skin crawling, his throat closing up, his eyes fixed on the object in his hand.

Then he realized it wasn’t a knife.

It was a set of hair clippers.

The man reached into the darkness for something else and came back with a wooden bowl. The same one he’d used on Drake the night he’d taken him. He put it down, in between his legs, and leaned forward, so he was over the bowl, looking down at it. And then he placed the clippers against his head, right at the top of his skull where his hair was the thickest, and switched them on. Slowly he moved the shaver through his black hair, eyes on Drake the whole time, creating naked lines on his scalp like rows of ploughed corn. There was no emotion in his face at all. No movement in his body other than his arm passing back and forth across his head. No sound but the mechanical whine of the clippers, a constant buzz that went on for what seemed like hours, hair falling gently into the bowl. Then, finally, when most of the hair was gone, he switched them off.