Vanished (8 page)

13 February

Healy looked up to see he was the only one in the office. It was 10 p.m. For a second, twenty-three years of instinct kicked in and he reached for his jacket, his first thought of Gemma and what she would say when he got home. But then reality hit: Gemma had left him, their marriage was over and the only home he had to go to was a dark, pokey flat in King’s Cross he was renting from a friend at Scotland Yard.

He leaned back in his chair and fixed his eyes on the clock at the far end of the room. Below it was a map of central London and two photographs of two different men. Their names were Steven Wilky and Marc Evans. The map had pins, Post-it notes, pieces of paper and marker pen all over it. Healy glanced at his in-tray: burglaries, violent domestics, dealers. He’d been given a second chance at the Met, survived the disciplinary procedure and come out the other end, but he hadn’t done it unscathed. He’d taken a demotion, from detective sergeant down to detective constable, and now he was working the sort of cases he’d left behind a decade ago. They were his ticket back in, the way to win Craw’s favour, but he hated them; hated the satisfaction it gave people like Eddie Davidson
to see him working shitty cases that were plainly beneath him.

What he wanted was something bigger.

What he wanted was Wilky and Evans.

Voices in the corridor. He looked over the top of his monitor and saw Davidson, Richter and Sallows approaching the office, laughing at something one of them had said. He thought about grabbing his jacket and heading out the other door, but it was too late to make a swift exit without being noticed. He’d have to ride this one out.

Davidson entered first, saw movement out of the corner of his eye and zeroed in on Healy. The other two followed suit, the pack mimicking their leader. A smile spread across Davidson’s face, his small dark eyes flicking from one side of the room to the other, making sure no one else was around. Then they all started to approach.

‘I didn’t think you’d need to clock overtime working domestics, Colm,’ Davidson said by way of a greeting. The other two smiled. Davidson came right up to Healy, into his personal space, and then backed away slightly, perching himself on a desk opposite. ‘Or maybe you’re finding them tough to crack.’

The other two laughed. Healy looked at Davidson, then at Richter and Sallows, and felt the muscles in his jaw tighten.
Don’t let them get to you
. There was a flash of disappointment in Davidson’s eyes when Healy didn’t rise to the bait.

‘Seriously, Colm, what are you doing here?’

‘What does it look like, Eddie?’

Davidson’s eyes flicked to Healy’s desk and then back again. ‘It looks like you’re still here at ten o’clock and all you’ve got in your tray are piece-of-shit cases.’

‘Even piece-of-shit cases need closing.’

Davidson frowned, like Healy had said something stupid. Then he looked him up and down, his desk, his work space. ‘What
is
this?’

‘What’s what?’

‘This,’ he said, waving an arm in Healy’s direction. ‘You were away – what? – ten weeks, and suddenly you’re the fucking Zen master?’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘You don’t follow?’ He shuffled off the edge of the desk, running a hand through his beard, and stepped in closer. ‘The old Healy was a prick, but at least you knew where you were with him. You said something he didn’t like, and he flipped out. Screamed in your face, did everything in his power to fuck things up for you and everyone around him. But this new one …’ He stopped, looked Healy up and down like he was pond life. ‘You’re just a shell. You’re fried. You’ve got nothing left in the tank.’

‘I guess we’ll see.’

‘What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’ Sallows this time. He was in his early fifties, just like Davidson, but unlike Davidson he was tall and skinny. The two of them had been together for years. Before things went wrong, before Leanne went missing, Healy used to joke that they were an old married couple. But not any more. There were no jokes now. Those days were gone.

Healy glanced at Sallows. ‘What do you think it means, Kevin?’

‘I think it means you’re done,’ Sallows said.

Healy looked between the three of them. He’d known Richter for the least amount of time and, judging on his
performance tonight, he wasn’t going to be much to worry about. But Davidson and Sallows were different. They’d keep chipping away at him until the first cracks appeared, and then they’d get into the cracks and prise them as far open as they’d go.

Davidson leaned forward, into Healy’s personal space again. ‘Look at you – you’re pathetic. You can’t even get it together for a fight any more.’

For a second, Healy imagined reaching up, grabbing Davidson by the neck and smashing his face through the table; felt the tremor in his hands, the fire in his chest, the need to react and hit out. But then he remembered standing in a darkened courtyard the October before, waving a gun in Davidson’s face, and telling him that he would kill him if he got in the way of finding Leanne. Healy had meant it too; never been so sure about anything in his entire life. But it had cost him – his position, his marriage – and now he needed to maintain control in order to claw his way back out of the hole and get his teeth into something better. He looked beyond Davidson, to the photographs on the far wall.

He wanted a piece of that.

He wanted to help find those two men.

He wanted to hunt the Snatcher.

At 1 a.m., I was still awake. Through the open window, I could hear the soft drone of cars from Gunnersbury Avenue and the gentle whine of a plane overhead, but otherwise the streets of Ealing were still. No breeze, no animals rummaging around, no people passing.

The first day of a new case it was always difficult to sleep. Everything was new – the people, their world – and every question you asked at the beginning only led to more questions. Those that remained unanswered were like holes; little punctures in the case that you had to find a way to repair before the whole thing collapsed.

And there were already big holes in Sam Wren’s life.

When the clock hit 1.30, I finally accepted I wasn’t going to sleep, flipped back the covers and sat up. Grabbing my trousers, I padded through to the living room where Liz’s MacBook was still set up. I cleared the screensaver and plugged in the USB stick Task had got for me, saving the contents on to the desktop. Then I opened the videos again and watched them through. A shiver of electricity passed along my spine as I saw Sam for the last time, his legs and briefcase disappearing as the train doors slid shut. And then the train jerked forward and headed into the black of the tunnel.

Gone
.

Behind me, I heard footsteps in the hallway and looked
back to see Liz emerge from the darkness. She moved through to the kitchen, filled a glass with water and returned to where I was sitting.

‘Can’t you sleep?’

‘No. I’ve got first-night insomnia.’

She nodded. Her eyes fell on the laptop. I’d rewound the footage to the seconds before the train doors closed. ‘Is this your guy?’

‘That’s his train.’

‘Where’s he?’

I pointed to his legs. ‘There.’

‘All you’ve got are his legs?’

‘In Victoria, yes.’

‘What about after?’

‘This is the last time you get to see him.’

She leaned in even closer and tabbed the footage on. Doors sliding shut. Train taking off. Disappearing into the tunnel. ‘That’s a bit …
creepy
, isn’t it?’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, he just disappears.’

‘People disappear all the time.’

‘Yeah, but they don’t just disappear, do they?’ She tabbed the footage back and looked at me. ‘When people disappear, they wander off somewhere, hide, try not to resurface. Or they die: they commit suicide, someone kills them, something. Their body goes
somewhere
. But you’ve been through the footage and you can’t see the join. You can’t see where he went. To me …’ She faded out. ‘To me that’s a bit creepy.’

I didn’t say anything, but in the silence I realized Liz might be right: there
was
something disquieting about Sam
Wren’s journey that morning, more so now I’d seen the CCTV video. I still knew, in the rational part of me, the part I built cases on, that Sam
had
to have left the train – but without being able to see him do it, without the physical act of stepping on to the platform, something troubling remained.

‘I’ll see you in bed,’ she said quietly.

I watched her go and then turned back to the footage. There were twelve thousand CCTV cameras in and around the London Underground. The ticket halls. The platforms. The walkways. The trains. Sam couldn’t have avoided them all.

I had to widen the search.

I woke with a start. Outside I could hear people talking, a car idling, and – even more distantly – the sound of a dog barking. Disorientated and half asleep, I sat up in bed, feeling the sheet fall away, a faint breeze reaching across from the window and clawing at my skin. Seconds later, my phone began buzzing.

I grabbed it. ‘David Raker.’

‘David, it’s Spike. You okay?’

‘Yeah. Late night. What time is it?’

‘7.15. Do you want me to call back?’

‘No.’ I got to my feet, grabbed one of Liz’s least feminine dressing gowns and put it on. I made my way through to the living room, set the phone down and switched to speaker. ‘What have you got for me, Spike?’

‘Sorry it’s taken me so long.’

‘Not a problem.’

‘So, you asked for a complete financial picture, as well
as his phone records. I’ll send them through as a PDF, so you can grab them on the move.’

‘Great. Anything I need to know?’

‘Nah, it’s all pretty self-explanatory. The financial stuff runs to about twenty-five pages. The phone records I’m doing a bit of work on: for each of the incoming and outgoing numbers I’ll get you a name and address.’

‘Great work – are those coming over today?’

‘Yeah. Not until a bit later on, though. Getting these names and addresses for you will take longer, but it’ll save you a load of time.’

‘You’re the man, Spike.’

I thanked him and killed the call.

Now it was time to brave the Tube at rush hour.

Gloucester Road Tube station sits on the corner of Gloucester Road and Courtfield Road. Its two-tone facade – all glazed terracotta tiles and sandy brick – harks back to the grand old days of the Underground; to a time when the Tube wasn’t just a vessel to get people to their destination, but an experience, a day out. In truth, it was hard to imagine those times on the hot, cramped District line, moving through the bowels of the earth where there was no air, and eventually no daylight.

Heading out of the Tube, I walked the half-mile to the Wrens’ street, then did a 180 and retraced the same route, just as Sam would have done the day he went missing. Fifteen minutes later I was at the main entrance, passing through the three thin arches that would lead me back into the earth.

I took the stairs down to the Circle line platform. The crowds had thinned out in the time I’d been outside. The westbound train was already in the station, but I wanted to go eastbound, so I took a seat on one of the grey metal benches and watched the other passengers. People had always fascinated me: what made them different, how they lied and covered up, how they emoted and broke down. I hadn’t missed the crush of the commute in the years since I’d given up journalism, but I missed the opportunity to
watch and learn from the crowds. All the books on kinesics, on the language of the body and the psychology of interviews, helped fill in the blanks. But I’d never learned more than on weekday mornings when I’d been surrounded by a sea of commuters.

Once I was on the eastbound train, I got out at every Circle line station, took the escalators or the stairs up to street level and then made my way back down again. At Westminster – the station that would have been the best and most obvious escape route on the day Sam vanished – I spent a couple of minutes moving between the Circle and Jubilee lines. On a regular work day, Sam would have made the switch in order to go east to Canary Wharf.

Then, about two hours in, I started the journey in reverse – and for the first time a part of me wondered what I was hoping to achieve. In any investigation, you had to feel like you were moving forward; every place you went to, every person you spoke to, had to push the case on. Riding the Tube was a way of understanding Sam better, of getting a feel for his routine. His life. But I’d found nothing of him. No trace of him here, and no trace of him on the footage.

I pushed the doubts down and carried on.

At 11.30, I got back to the gateline at Gloucester Road and noticed a couple of Tube employees. One was standing in a booth watching people pass through; the other was talking to a group of Japanese tourists and pointing to a map. The one in the booth looked up as I approached. He was small, wiry, his eyes dark, his face pale. Close in,
his skin seemed too thin, as if it were tracing paper that was about to tear.

‘Morning.’

He nodded in reply. Nothing else.

I ignored the lack of response and pressed on, introducing myself and telling him about Sam. When I was done, I got out a photograph and showed it to him. It was a long shot given the number of people who must have passed through the station every day, but it was a question that needed to be asked. Sometimes, even when you built cases on precision and reason, you had to throw a little mud at the wall and see what stuck.

‘Don’t recognize him,’ he said, his eyes straying across the photo and then away again. He shifted back on the stool he was on, and his thin summer jacket opened a little. Underneath I could see a badge pinned to his shirt:
DUNCAN
PELL
. I assumed, given he was at the gateline, that he was a regular customer-service assistant. It was hard to see him as anything more, as a station supervisor or duty station manager.

‘Are you here permanently?’ I asked.

His eyes came back to me. ‘What?’