Vanished (37 page)

But I didn’t know his face.

I moved the footage on a couple of frames, and for the first time concentrated solely on him. What he was doing. Where he was headed. And as he leaned over to get the sign, I noticed a fractional movement close to his body, so slight it was virtually invisible. I had to rewind the footage just to make sure I’d seen it:
he already had the sign under his arm
. I could see the very edge of it – a triangle of white plastic – slowly slide out from under his elbow while the rest of the sign remained obscured at ground level.

Which meant he’d never been picking up the sign.

He’d been picking up something else.

Next was the moment where he actually
did
bring up the sign. As the video rolled on, it played out exactly the same way it always had: he straightened, stepped towards the doors, turning his back to the glass, and then there was a brief pause. Except now I saw something else I’d never been looking for before: a weird shift to his right, like a jolt.
Like he was pulling on something
. Seconds later, he turned
around again, facing the glass, but the sign was fully up in front of him.

As if in a deliberate move to disguise himself.

Before long, he was back in shot: he was standing behind the protesters at the door, the lower half of his body visible, the red protest T-shirt over a pale blue fleece. But it wasn’t an official protest T-shirt. As I’d noted the very first time I’d watched the footage, it had red and white checks on the sleeves.

Checks.

I paused the video.

Is it the checks?

I wanted to get a clear view of his face, but all I could see were his legs, part of an arm, and his hand holding the sign. There were other protesters either side of him, trying to squeeze their way out of the train, everyone jostling for space. But, even in among them all, even though I couldn’t see his face, something about the man was suddenly familiar to me.

Do I know you?

I tabbed forward, quicker this time, punching at the cursor with my fingers as the footage rolled on. Moments later, he was finally at the doors and the crowds in front of him were fanning out onto the platform. Except for one person.

One person stayed close to him.

Which was when everything changed.

The man at the doors of the train paused and then joined the other groups being funnelled towards the platform exit. I hadn’t been looking for him. I’d been looking for Sam. I’d been looking for Sam
on his own
. I’d been looking for him in a suit, or in a protest T-shirt that had been pulled
over
a suit,
or
– at the very least – over a shirt and tie. If he’d removed his coat and jacket in order to put on the T-shirt, it made sense that he would have been carrying them, or they would have been inside his briefcase.

But Sam wasn’t carrying a coat or jacket.

He wasn’t even holding a briefcase.

And he wasn’t leaving the train on his own.

The man with the sign had his arm around Sam Wren’s waist, though if you weren’t specifically looking, you could barely even tell. I’d never noticed before. It looked like the two of them had just been pushed together by the crowds. Sam was in an official red protest T-shirt, pulled over his work shirt, but he had nothing else with him. I’d always figured the briefcase had gone with him, because if he’d left it behind, it would have been shipped off to lost property and ultimately traced back to him. But it had never surfaced. So either it had contained nothing that could lead back to Sam – or any kind of link to him had been taken out of the case before it was left in the train.

He looked woozy, unsteady on his feet, but the man
was keeping him close. This was the perfect morning to drug someone: there were so many people, so many protesters dressed the same, that no one batted an eyelid. Sam still seemed capable of walking, still seemed capable of being manipulated, but he had no fight in him, no way of preventing what was happening. That was enough to make him pass unnoticed. And the man knew
exactly
where the CCTV cameras were in order to save drawing attention to the two of them. There were only the checked sleeves of his red shirt, and the sign. No clear view of his face. He made sure the same was true of Sam too: inside a second of hitting the platform, he raised the protest sign above their heads, shifting it across so nothing of Sam’s upper half was visible any more.

Inside eight seconds, they were both gone.

I rewound the footage.

Something squirmed through my stomach as I watched it all unfold again. This was the drug he must have used on Wilky, on Erion, on Symons and on Drake. This was how he was able to walk them out of their front doors. I couldn’t see him drug Sam – maybe because he’d done it between stations – and, in fact, couldn’t see Sam inside the carriage at any point once it arrived at Westminster. But when the man was bending down, presumably dealing with the briefcase, Sam’s clothes and Sam himself – that had to have been moments after Sam had been jabbed with a syringe. From there, the man had been incredibly adept: he kept Sam on the floor, out of sight of any cameras – and the moment he turned his back and jolted to the right was the moment he yanked Sam to his feet again. Unseen by CCTV. Unseen by me.

I imagined what came next: if anyone had paid any sort of attention – and most people hadn’t because most people were disembarking protesters, half watching a fight at the other end of the platform – he’d claim Sam had fainted. He’d have taken his jacket off, pretending that he was trying to get him some air. Then, as the drug kicked in, he would have made Sam put the T-shirt on, helped it on to him, knowing he was pliant. Putting a protest T-shirt on him, even as he lay there semi-conscious, would have looked odd, but it wouldn’t have looked odd
enough
. People might have wondered what the man was doing – why he was putting the T-shirt on now, of all times – but once he was off and out of sight of the carriage, most of them would barely even recall it as a footnote. This was London, after all. A city where a body had once lain dead for five days in plain sight before anyone paid it any attention. A city where a jewellery shop’s windows were smashed in by an armed gang and people just wandered past. He didn’t have to worry about people remembering. He just had to get Sam off the train without being seen by the cameras. And but for a second – maybe even less – as they stepped out on to the platform, he’d managed it. I knew the footage better than anyone, had watched it more times than anyone, but it had taken me countless viewings – endless repetition, rewinding and inching through, frame by frame – before I’d seen him walk Sam out.

The Snatcher.

It had to be him.

But why take Sam? Why deviate from the plan? I let the questions go for the time being, moving the slider back to the moment they stepped off the train. And in the second
they were both visible – Sam, drugged, looking down at the floor, the man next to him turning away and trying to protect his identity – I finally saw the face of a killer. I saw the man who had taken Sam Wren. I saw the man who had taken Steven Wilky from a flat half a mile from Paddington; Marc Erion from an apartment in King’s Cross; Joseph Symons from his home north of Farringdon station; and Jonathan Drake from his flat in Hammersmith.

All homes close to the Tube stations.

All stops on the Circle line.

He was using it as his hunting ground, watching the men, following them, getting to know their routines and then moving in for them. He knew the Underground stations.

Because he worked them.

I’d looked right at him so many times in the footage as he’d moved around inside the carriage, his face a blur behind the glass. I’d watched so many times as he’d stepped out onto the platform, the sign shielding him and his victim from the cameras – and not once had I put it together.

But I knew why I had today.

His clothes were different from the uniform he should have been wearing on a Friday morning, and maybe he’d thought that was what would make him blend in. But, ultimately, it was the change of clothes that had given him away. Because now I saw why this time, of all times, I’d been drawn to him: a red T-shirt with checked sleeves. The same top I’d seen in his gym bag earlier in the day.

The Snatcher knew the Circle line because he worked it.

The Snatcher was Edwin Smart.

As I drove, I jammed my phone into the hands-free and dialled Healy’s number. It rang and rang, with no answer. Finally, after half a minute, it clicked and went to voicemail.

‘This is Healy, leave a message.’

‘Shit.’ I waited for the beep. ‘Healy, it’s me. Everything’s changed. It’s not Sam or Pell you should be looking for, it’s a guy called Edwin Smart. He’s a ticket inspector on the Circle line. He took Sam. He took all of them. You need to tell Craw right now.’

I killed the call, my mind turning over.

Craw
.

I dialled the station that the Snatcher task force were working out of, then asked to be connected to Craw. ‘She’s out in the field at the moment, sir, and I’m afraid I can’t –’

‘Wherever she is, she’s at the wrong place.’

‘Well, sir, I can’t –’

‘No,
listen
to me: you need to connect me unless you want her to get back and find out
you
are the reason she couldn’t stop a killer disappearing for good.’

A pause. Then the line connected.

It rang ten times with no answer and then went silent. A click. And then it started to ring again. She was redirecting my call. On the third ring, someone picked up.

‘Davidson.’

Shit. Anyone but Davidson.

‘Davidson, it’s David Raker.’

A snort. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

‘Sam Wren isn’t the Snatcher.’

‘
What?
I thought we made it clear to you –’

‘Just listen to me –’

‘No, you listen to me, you weaselly piece of shit. You and that fucking sideshow Healy are
done
. You get it? He’s cooked, and when he’s done I’m gonna find the hole in your story and I’m gonna hang you out to dry. You think you’re some sort of vigilante, is that it? You’re nothing. Zero. And you’re gonna be even less than that when I’m done.’

‘Do what you have to do, but you need to hear this.’

‘I
need
to hear this?’

‘Sam Wren isn’t the guy you need to be looking for, it’s a –’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re done.’

And then he hung up.

I smashed my fists against the steering wheel and looked out into the rain.
Healy’s cooked
. Had they found out about him working the case off the books? A fleeting thought passed through my head – a moment where I wondered how he would react to that, and how he might endanger himself and the people around him – and then my mind switched back to Smart. I dialled Directory Enquiries and got them to put me through to Gloucester Road station. After three rings, a woman picked up.

‘How can I help you?’ she asked.

‘I’m looking for a revenue control inspector.’

‘You’d be better off calling the depot at Hammersmith.’

‘His name’s Edwin Smart.’

He could have been at any station on the line, not just Gloucester Road. But I’d found him twice there and he seemed to know the people who worked in and around it. They liked him, he liked them – or, at least, he pretended to. But he could put on a show, and he could manipulate those around him, starting with Sam Wren and Duncan Pell.

‘Do you know him at all?’ I pressed.

‘Edwin Smart?’

‘Yes.’

She paused. ‘What did you say your name was, sir?’

‘Detective Sergeant Davidson.’

I could sense a change, without any words even being spoken. Most people, even people who knew they had a duty to protect people’s privacy, started to get nervous when the police came calling. ‘Uh …’ She stopped again. ‘Uh, I’m not really, uh …’

I recognized the voice then: Sandra Purnell. The woman I’d spoken to in the staffroom, and the woman who had hugged Smart as I’d been about to approach him.

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.

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.