Vanished (13 page)

‘So you started following him at the end of October?’

‘End of October, beginning of November.’

‘How many times did you follow him?’

‘Only twice. The second time I started feeling ridiculous. I was angry with him – jealous and hurt, I suppose – but I got a dose of clarity halfway through the evening the second time and that was when I left.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘Both times, it was just down there, to the Hilton.’ She was pointing over my head, in the direction of South Quay. ‘He just sat there in the bar by himself.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Nothing. Just drinking. Like he was deep in thought.’

‘That was it?’

‘That was it.’

Deep in thought
. But about what?

‘You never told Sam you followed him?’

‘No. He would have flipped.’

‘And done what?’

‘He wasn’t violent, if that’s you mean. We only ever had one fight in the time we were seeing each other. But he wouldn’t have taken kindly to me following him.’

‘What was the fight about?’

‘It was a Friday night,’ she said, remembering it instantly. ‘August, in the weeks before he started getting weird. He was in the shower and his phone went off. It was right there next to me on the bed, so – without even thinking, really – I glanced at the display to see who was calling. It was just an automatic reaction. I saw the name, it didn’t mean anything to me, so I just assumed it was a client of his. When he came back out, I told him his phone had gone off and he was fine about it. Really relaxed. Then he checked to see who’d called, and it all changed.’

‘Changed how?’

‘He went absolutely crazy. Started accusing me of snooping around in his phone, of going through his private things. It just came out of nowhere. I tried to tell him I hadn’t done anything, that I hadn’t looked at his
messages, that I didn’t even know who the guy was who’d called him, but he wouldn’t believe me. I’d never seen him like that.’

‘Who was the caller?’

‘Some guy called Adrian.’

‘No surname?’

‘It just said Adrian.’

I noted it down. He definitely wasn’t on Julia’s list, which meant she didn’t know about him, and although I didn’t remember seeing an Adrian in the phone records, it didn’t mean he wasn’t there. Spike had got me eighteen months of calls and texts from Sam’s phone, and – in the first run-through – I’d concentrated on repeating numbers and the people who’d contacted Sam the most. Adrian was a reason to go back to it.

‘Did you ever find out who this Adrian guy was?’ I asked.

‘No. Sam was too busy screaming in my face. I was determined not to sit there and take it, but I couldn’t fight back. He just
blitzed
me; completely shouted me down.’

‘Did he apologize?’

‘The next day, yeah. But a couple of weeks after that he started backing away. That was the end for us. That was the moment things really changed.’ She paused, one of her eyes blurring. ‘And then four months later he was gone.’

By the time I got back to the car, I had a name: Adrian Wellis. There had been just one call in the entire year and a half I had records for: 5 August, just as Ursula had described. The call lasted eight seconds, which presumably meant he’d dialled in, got voicemail and then hung up. Sam never phoned back; Wellis never tried again. And yet, in order for Ursula to read his name on the display, Sam must have put Wellis into his address book. So why would Sam go to that kind of trouble for a person he was never going to ring?

As Spike had done with all the other numbers, he’d managed to source a street address off the back of the call. Tierston Road, Peckham. It was only five miles from Canary Wharf, which meant I could have been down there inside thirty minutes, barring traffic jams. But heading down now meant heading in blind.

Liz had once said to me that the reason I did what I did, the reason I put my life at risk for the missing, was because I was trying to plug holes in the world that couldn’t be filled; trying to prevent other people from feeling the way I had. She meant Derryn. She meant her death, and everything – all the grief and anger – that came after. I understood that, saw the truth in it, even told her – and maybe believed – that I could control that
part of me and become a different person. Not detached exactly, but not so affected by the people I found either. When you became affected by them, by their stories, by the people they’d lost, you took risks: you stepped into the dark, not knowing what was there – and the only armour you took into battle was the debt you felt to the families.

I knew Liz was right and, for a time, I’d resisted the temptation to stray back into the shadows. I stayed rooted to the right side of the dividing line, taking the cases, working them and closing them off, then leaving them alone. But it couldn’t be like that for ever. Seeing through my commitment to the lost, to their families – however I did it and whatever it took – was who I was. It was woven into me. When Derryn died, a little part of me went too – and the space she left behind was never filled; only replaced, temporarily, by the people I returned to the light. I wanted to be with Liz, wanted to be in her life. But she’d never fully understood that part of me.

That was the fault line in our relationship.

And, ultimately, maybe the force that would tear us apart.

Adrian Wellis lived in a tatty two-storey red-brick terrace house with a concrete garden and sheets for curtains. Behind it was a sink estate called The Firs: a monolithic series of concrete blocks, housing almost ten thousand people.

Outside it was still hot and airless: clouds didn’t move in the sky, leaves didn’t move in the trees, just the faint
shimmer of a heat haze coming off the tarmac. All along the road, windows were open, but at Wellis’s gate there was a strange, eerie kind of silence to the place. No music. No kids. Only the distant sound of cars on the Old Kent Road and the occasional squawk of a bird. The doorbell didn’t work, so I knocked a couple of times.

No answer.

There were two mottled glass panels in the door. Inside was a hallway with three doors off it. Stairs off to the right. Close to the door was a light bulb with no lampshade.

I knocked again and waited.

The front garden was a mess; only a garden in name. Everything had been paved over and left to decay. The slabs were uneven, weeds crawling through the gaps between them. Four big concrete blocks were in a pile at the end of the driveway. On top was a flowerpot, no flowers in it, just earth.

When there was no answer for a second time, I headed out, down to the end of the road, and around to the back of the houses. Every home had a six-foot-high fence marked with a number. Wellis’s had been painted on, the paint running the full length of the gate and collecting in a pool on the step at the bottom. He’d never bothered cleaning it up. I tried the gate. It was locked.

Walking back around to the front, I knocked for a third time.

‘Mr Wellis?’

Again, nothing. No sound of movement from inside. I put my ear to the door, just to be sure, but the house was
quiet. No voices. No television. For a brief second I thought about trying to pick the locks – then reality kicked in. In broad daylight, it was too risky.

All I could do now was wait.

27 February | Four Months Earlier

It was just before 9 a.m. when Healy walked past the visitor centre in the prison. Inside, a network of tables and chairs were bolted to the floor, populated by identically dressed prisoners and the people who had come to see them. Everything was under surveillance by CCTV, while guards circled the room, their eyes moving from table to table.

Beyond it, the corridor ahead looked sick: pale green linoleum, matching walls, empty noticeboards and reinforced windows into vacant, dark rooms. At the end was a counter, a window pulled across, with a guard on the other side at a computer. He had silver hair and milky eyes, half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose. When he saw Healy approaching, he slid the window across.

‘How you doing, Colm?’

‘Pretty good, Clive. You?’

The guard nodded. He had a slow, considered style, which Healy had never been able to read in all the years he’d known him. It could have been age, or it could have been a natural distrust of people. ‘You’re late today,’ the guard said.

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Well, you better get going.’

Healy’s eyes drifted up for a second to the sign on the wall above the window. Black letters on peeling white paint: ‘High Security Unit’.

‘Yeah,’ Healy said. ‘I better get going.’

After passing through security, he moved along another corridor, doors on either side, the distant sound of voices audible. The prison cells were directly adjacent, though there were no windows until he got to the end of the corridor. He slowed up. Two rooms, both behind security doors, but with reinforced glass panels that Healy could see in through. He stepped up to the first.

Inside, seven men were seated on chairs in a semicircle. Different faces, different builds, but all dressed in prison uniforms. Healy got in even closer to the glass. As he angled his body, he saw her. The psychologist. All the prisoners were watching her. She was perched on the edge of a chair opposite them, talking.

‘There you are,’ Healy said quietly.

It was biting cold as he waited in his car outside. Snow was shovelled into piles all around him, the early morning still blanketed by a fuzzy kind of half-light. After a couple of minutes, the woman exited the prison and started to head out across the car park. Her scrawny frame was hidden beneath a sheepskin coat, her hair tied into a messy, uneven ponytail, her eyes fixed on her phone. Ever since his return to the Met, he’d been using the database to find out about her, looking into her life piece by piece, building
a picture of who she was. But not within sight of Craw. Not within sight of anybody else.

Her name was Teresa Reed. Forty-eight. Divorced, no kids. She’d been coming to the prison on weekly visits for nineteen months. Same day every week, same purpose: to interview and talk to the prisoners. To Healy, none of that really mattered, other than the fact that she didn’t have kids. That suited him fine. If she’d had kids, it would have made it harder to formulate his plan, and harder still to execute it. With kids, there was guilt, fuzzy thinking, emotion, a million reasons not to hurt her. Without them, she had no responsibility to anyone but herself, and no one to miss her.

He got out of his car and pretended to fiddle around in the pocket on the driver’s door. He’d been watching her for almost six weeks, and today was the first day he was making any sort of contact with her. He glanced up to see her getting closer. Healy had parked here for a reason: it was right next to her Mini. She had to come across him, and step in next to him, to get to her car.

He heard her shoes in the slush about six feet away from him, closed the door of his car and then purposely bumped into her without looking.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, looking at her.

She glanced at him. ‘No problem.’

They stood like that for a moment, across from one another, and he saw how old she looked close up. Weathered.
That’s what happens when you spend your life making nice with scumbags
. Healy frowned. ‘Do I know you?’ he said.

She returned the frown. ‘I don’t think so, no.’

‘You’re not Teresa, are you?’

Her face softened. ‘Yes,’ she said, and then paused, obviously embarrassed she didn’t recognize him. ‘I’m so sorry … I can’t quite place your, uh …’

He held up a hand, forced a smile. ‘It’s fine. Colm Healy. I work at the Met. I think you came into my station after the riots last year.’

Her mouth formed an
O
. Healy had checked all this. He didn’t know her and had never met her, but he’d found her in the system when the station chief superintendent, Bartholomew, had had some ridiculous idea about getting psychologists involved in the interviewing of looters. There was no thought behind it other than getting him into his favourite place – the papers – but Teresa Reed had been one of the shrinks he’d brought in.

‘Anyway,’ Healy said, locking the car. ‘Nice to meet you again.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You too.’

He left her, walking off towards the prison building. When he heard her Mini start up and drive off, he turned around and headed back to the car. Unlocked it. Slid in at the wheel. His heart was beating fast and his palms were slick with sweat, even in the cool of the morning. Slowly the windows of the car began to steam up and he wondered whether he was doing the right thing. But then he felt the burn of grief and anger in the centre of his chest, and any doubts were washed away.

While I watched the house, I used my phone and went searching for Wellis online. Facebook was the world’s greatest detective. Inside a minute you could get yourself a picture. And if there were holes in their privacy settings, seconds after that you had their whole life. It was even easier if you had an unusual surname. My Facebook account was a shell – no details, no photos, no posts – but it got me access to other people’s, and although I couldn’t see Wellis’s wall, info or friends, I could see all his photos.

There were fifteen in all: Wellis at the beach, in woodland somewhere, standing on the edge of a lake with a hunting rifle. He was five-ten, stocky, about forty, with a shaved head. He had a tattoo of a crucifix on the side of his neck. In most of the photos he was on his own, but when he wasn’t he was always with the same guy: taller, thinner, late thirties. They both had looks I didn’t like, but Wellis – his eyes small, like an animal’s – I’d have to watch the closest.

After a while light began to fade from the day, the sun burning out in the sky, the clouds bleeding red and orange. Inside twenty minutes it became a different world: shadows grew deep and long, like vast curtains being pulled across a stage, and although the temperature didn’t drop much, a faint breeze picked up, whispering past the car and down towards the house.

Twenty minutes after that, I heard voices on the other side of the road.