Tim Weaver - Vanished

‘I understand the reasons,’ he said after a while, pain in his voice.

Neither of us spoke for a time, both of us looking down into half-finished coffee cups. Then I saw him look up and study me for a second, as if he was deciding whether to ask something or not.

‘You remember what you said to me once?’

I smiled. ‘I said a lot of things.’

‘You said, “There’s no shame in hanging on. There’s no shame in believing they might walk through the door at any moment.” ’

I nodded.

‘Do you still believe that?’

I looked at him, then across his shoulder to where a picture still hung of Derryn and me, backpacks on, halfway up a tor in Dartmoor. It had been taken the week before Derryn found the lump on her breast. The last week before the end began.

My eyes fell on Healy again.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I still believe it.’

79

Derryn was buried in Hayden Cemetery, a sliver of parkland in north London, just off Holloway Road, between Highbury and Canonbury. As I pulled up in the car park, I felt a pang of guilt, as if I were somehow betraying Liz by being here. Maybe, in a weird way, I was. The first sign of trouble, the first sign of doubt, and I returned to my old life and to the woman who had shaped it. I rarely came back to the cemetery any more, but when I did it was always because I didn’t know where else to go; how else to get past the way I was feeling. It was quiet, undisturbed, and after the search for Sam Wren, after everything Healy had said to me that morning, all the pain I recognized in him, the cemetery brought a strange kind of comfort, even if my memories of it were sad.

The entrance itself was a huge black iron arch, the name Hayden woven into the top, and as I passed through I could see the split path ahead of me: one branch headed down to where hundreds of graves unfurled in perfect lines on a huge bank of grass; the other bent up and around, partially covered by tall fir trees, into the western fringes of the cemetery, where Derryn’s grave – in a tiny walled garden called ‘The Rest’ – was situated. Adjacent to The Rest was the older, Victorian part of the cemetery, all mausoleums and tombs, winding paths and walled gardens. One of the reasons Derryn chose this spot, when she’d decided against more chemo, was for its sense of peace. Once you were inside the walls of The Rest, no wind came through; you were protected on one side by a bank of fir trees, and on the other by the huge Gothic structures of the old cemetery.

I moved through the gate of The Rest, the sun piercing a film of thin white cloud, and across to her grave. The last flowers I’d brought, months before, were nothing but a memory now; if they hadn’t already been dead, they would have been baked by the sun and then washed away by the rain in the past week. I could see a trace of a petal on her gravestone but nothing more. Grass grew long at the base, up towards the date of her death, so I reached forward and tore some of it up, throwing it away and clearing a space.

Then something moved to my left.

I turned. Immediately beyond the wall was a huge tomb, its door facing out at me, flanked by two arched windows. On top was a stone angel, carrying a water bowl. I got to my feet and stepped away from the grave, opening up my view beyond it. A path led to its left, along a narrow trail, tombs on either side, simpler graves in between. Grass swayed gently along the trail, moved by the wind, but I couldn’t hear it. All I could hear was birdsong and, distantly beyond that, the sound of an engine idling in the car park.

Behind me, I glimpsed a couple in their sixties, the woman holding a bunch of flowers, emerging on the other side of the fir trees and heading down towards the field of graves. And then, in the direction I’d seen movement, a bird swooped out from one of the trees, glided along the trail and soared up on to the triangular roof of a tomb further along.

I rubbed an eye; ran a hand through my hair. I was tired.

I knelt down again at the grave, brushing some of the dirt away with my fingers. Soil had got into the lettering, kicked up as people passed too closely. When it was clean, I looked around the rest of the garden and saw other families had been here more recently than me: the graves were decorated with flowers and vases, a handwritten letter on one, held down at the base of the headstone with a series of smooth pebbles.

Sorry I didn’t bring a vase , I thought to myself, and then I smiled at how Derryn would have reacted, probably telling me that I’d have to bring the flowers before I got to apologize about a vase. I studied the polished marble of the headstone, her name engraved in gold, and then I touched the letters beneath it, the marble cold against my skin: Beloved wife of David . It seemed such a long time ago in many ways, and yet the two and a half years had gone in the blink of an eye. One minute I was watching her being buried, the next I was lying alongside another woman. Perhaps now I had neither.

Crack .

A noise to my left, like twigs snapping beneath feet.

Same direction as the movement.

This time I got to my feet and stepped fully away from the grave, eyes on the trail leading between the tombs. It ran for about a hundred yards and then started a slow turn to the right where I could see a stone entranceway, vines cascading down from above, huge pillars on either side like the gates to heaven itself. I’d walked it once before. It led back around the other side of the bank of fir trees and joined up with the field of graves. On the other side of the entranceway, out of sight, were the biggest structures of them all: massive mausoleums, standing like houses.

I moved out through the gate of The Rest and along the path. The tombs ran in a roughly symmetrical pattern, facing each other on either side of the trail, smaller, plainer graves in between. In this part of the cemetery, the front of the tombs and the graves, as well as the trail itself, had been kept clear, but everywhere else nature had run wild. It was thick and relentless, the occasional gap showing through to the car park at the bottom, but otherwise a twisted mess of branches and leaves.

Halfway along the trail, something rustled in the undergrowth. I stopped, looked down and saw a small animal – a mouse, or maybe a vole – disappear into a thick tangle of grass and nettles. Then, through the corner of my eye, something else moved. Just a flicker of a shadow. I looked up, replaying what I thought I’d seen – the movement from left to right, one side of the trail to the other – and headed towards it, quicker now, eyes fixed on a tomb about three-quarters of the way along. It was half turned away from the trail, the door facing me, pillars either side, a coat of arms under the roof. But when I finally got level with the tomb and looked into the area behind it, there was nothing. Just swathes of thick, green brush and the shadow of the entranceway, about twenty feet away now.

What the hell is the matter with you?

Wind whistled through the entranceway, as if drawn into it, vines hanging down from its top, swaying in the breeze. I stood there, feeling slightly disorientated, looking through as the trail continued on to the mausoleums on the other side. All around me were trees and graves. Nothing else. For a moment it was like being in a cramped space, one that was gradually closing in, and as I stood there trying to figure out what I’d seen, and why I thought I might have seen it, I felt my phone start to vibrate in my pocket.

I took it out. It was Craw’s number.

‘David Raker.’

Interference. The line drifted.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s Craw.’

I could barely even hear her, and when I took the phone away from my ear I could see I only had a single bar. I moved back along the trail. ‘Can you hear me now?’