Tim Weaver - Vanished

In front of me, traffic slowed to a crawl. It was all coming together now.

‘When Smart saw me the first time I went to Gloucester Road, he probably worked out the worst-case scenario there and then: that I’d get to Wellis through Sam, which I did, and I’d eventually get to the man who’d taken Erion. As long as Wellis was alive, Smart was compromised, so he put a plan into place: he somehow got to Wellis in the days after he slipped from my grasp at the warehouse, and he lured him down to the line at Westminster. Persuaded him it was a safe haven, a place he could hide. Then he killed him and dumped his body there, somewhere no one would go or even think to look.’

I expected some kind of reaction from Healy. But I got nothing.

‘Are you okay, Healy?’

‘And Wren?’ came the response. ‘Smart set him up too.’

‘The message on the phone only came much later. By then he knew I was looking into Sam, and he’d started to panic again. The wheels had already been set in motion with Pell – he worked with him, had begun to move himself into Pell’s line of sight, had seen the potential for violence in Pell – so Smart kept at it, placing Spane’s coat and a set of knives at Pell’s house; and then the DVDs of Pell with the girl. Smart must have realized that Pell’s connection to the girl, and to the other prostitutes he’d used, would eventually lead back to Wellis, which was just another way for Smart to insulate himself. But Sam remained a problem. That was why the phone was so clumsy, why it never felt right. Smart recorded the message in desperation, hoping it would lead away from him.’

‘So I was wrong,’ Healy said, in a soft, stilled way I’d never heard before. I’d never heard him admit to a mistake in all the time I’d known him.

‘Wrong about what?’

‘I said the message wasn’t recorded under duress.’

‘It wasn’t, at least in the traditional sense. Smart didn’t put a gun to Sam’s head. All he had to do was pump Sam full of drugs and get him to read from a cue card. If he could walk them out against their will, Smart could also get them to say what he wanted. You remember what you said to me about that message on Drake’s phone?’

‘No emotion in his voice. Just empty words.’ I heard a deep intake of breath and then a sigh crackled down the phone line. ‘But why take Wren from the train? Smart had a foolproof MO. Why change it?’

I didn’t have an answer, just another theory. ‘Maybe he became consumed by Sam for some reason.’

‘Consumed?’

‘Obsessed.’ I shrugged. ‘Thing is, though, if Smart first saw Sam on the Circle line like he did with the others, then he would have followed him and found out – as soon as Sam got home – that he was married. Smart’s thing, the thing that gets him off, is gay men. He wouldn’t have known Sam was gay, not from his daily …’ I trailed off, a memory stirring.

‘What?’ Healy said.

My mind moved back three days to my meeting with Robert Wren and then to the conversation Healy and I had in the coffee shop at Shepherd’s Bush. Healy had accused me of being too invested in Sam as a person, of not being able to see the killer in him. But there had never been a killer in him. The lies he told were the lies I knew about. And he hadn’t been lying when he’d talked to his brother about the night he met Marc Erion. He said the guy lived in this place where there were no lights , Robert Wren had told me. He said he got to his door, on to the floor this guy was on, and all the bulbs were out. We knew why the lights were out. Smart had been through the building a couple of nights before taking Erion, creating cover for himself. And when he got to the flat , Robert Wren had told me, Sam said it felt like someone was there in the corridor with him .

‘The first time Smart saw Sam was at Erion’s flat.’

‘How d’you figure that?’

‘Something Robert Wren said to me.’ I paused, trying to line everything up. ‘Robert Wren said Sam went to see Erion on 11 November. Erion was taken on 13 November. Two days later. By then, Smart had already taken the lights out in Erion’s building, and he was doing the last of his recon. When he saw Sam come up to the door of the flat, he liked the look of him immediately. Perhaps, given the risks he took to get him, liked the look of him more than any of the others. And because Sam had come to see a male prostitute, Smart assumed he was gay. So Sam wasn’t part of the plan. But as soon as Smart saw him, he made him a part of it.

‘He was different from the others: he lived with someone, he didn’t live in the anonymity of a tower block, there was no way Smart could knock out lights in Sam’s street and then walk him out without anyone seeing. So he had to come up with another idea. He would have known about the protests on 16 December, he would have foreseen the risks, but what risk there was in taking Sam from the train was reduced by the chaos of the protests. He must have got on at Gloucester Road, stayed close to Sam and then used the first opportunity that came his way. With or without the fight on the platform, he would have done it. But the fight just made it all much simpler.’

‘Yeah, but why not just take Wren outside on the street? That time of year, it’s dark early, lots of shadow and cover. Much easier than from the inside of a carriage.’

‘But Smart knew the Circle line intimately.’

‘So?’

‘So maybe, to him, the train was less risky than outside on the street. Or maybe he was just watching Sam that day, with no actual plan to take him, and then the fight kicked off and he saw his chance. Or maybe … I don’t know, maybe it was symbolic.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Something to do with his father. Some connection to the trains.’

The conversation died away and I hit traffic lights at the top of Heath Street, as it forked into Hampstead High Street. Rain chattered away against the roof of the car. The wipers whined back and forth across the glass. People passed along the pavements under umbrellas. And in that time, all I got from Healy was silence.

‘I’m almost here.’

No reply.

‘Are you going to meet me at Smart’s?’ I asked him, and realized how prophetic this moment was. The October before, we’d ended up hunting the same man together. Now we were doing it again, as if we were bound to one another somehow. Two sides of the same coin. At the beginning, I’d always thought I was on the other side to Healy. Now I was starting to wonder if we weren’t the same: built for the same reason, to hunt the same monsters. I glanced at the phone again as nothing came back but silence. ‘Healy? Are you going to meet me?’

‘I can’t do that,’ he said.

‘Fine. Then you need to call Craw and tell her –’

‘I’m not calling Craw.’

‘You need to tell her what’s happening, Healy.’

‘It’s too late for that.’

‘What are you talking about?’

He sniffed. Cleared his throat. Is he crying?

‘Healy?’

‘She fired me this morning,’ he said, and there was so much pain in his voice, it was like an electrical current travelling down the line. ‘They found out what I was doing.’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘So she fired me.’

‘I’m so sorry, Healy.’

Silence.

‘Where are you now?’ I asked. Faintly, in the background of wherever he was, I could hear rain and the distant sound of people’s voices getting louder and then fading.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Where are you, Healy?’

‘It doesn’t matter any more.’

‘Don’t go and do anything stupid.’

A pause. ‘It’s too late for that now.’

And then he hung up.