The David Raker Collection

by Tim Weaver

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Legal Right

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  For Mum and Dad

  ‘All faces shall gather blackness …’

  Joel 2:6

  PART ONE

  1

  We met in a restaurant on the Thames called Boneacres. They were sitting in a booth at the back. Rain was running down the windows and both of them were staring out at a queue of people waiting in line for the Eye. The woman looked up first. Caroline Carver. She’d been crying. The whites of her eyes were stained red, and some of her make-up had run. She was slim and well dressed, in her mid forties, but didn’t wear it well: there were lines in her face – thick and dark like oil paint – that looked as if they’d been carved with a scalpel, and though she smiled as I approached, it wasn’t warm. She’d been past warm. Most of the parents I dealt with were like that. The longer their kids were missing, the colder their lives became.

  She slid out from the booth and we both shook hands, then she made way for her husband. James Carver. He was huge; a bear of a man. He didn’t get up, just reached across the table and swallowed my hand in his. I knew a little about them already, mostly from Caroline’s initial phone call a couple of days before. She’d told me they lived in an old church – converted into a four-bedroom home – from which he ran his building firm, a business he’d built up over fifteen years. Judging by the property’s two-million-pound price tag, the name brands they were sporting and some of his celebrity clients, it was keeping them pretty comfortable.

  He smiled at me, more genuine than his wife, and gestured to the other side of the booth. I slid in. The menu was open. The restaurant had been their suggestion, and when I looked at the prices, I was glad they were paying.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ Carver said.

  I nodded. ‘It seems like a nice place.’

  Both of them looked around, as if they hadn’t thought about it before. Carver smiled. Caroline’s eyes snapped back to the menu.

  ‘We used to come in here before we were married,’ he said. ‘Back when it was a steak and seafood place.’ His wife glanced at him, and he reached over and took her hand. ‘Caroline tells me you used to be a journalist.’

  ‘Once upon a time.’

  ‘Must have been interesting.’

  ‘Yeah, it was fun.’

  He glanced at my left hand. Two of my fingernails were sunken and cracked, a blob of white scarring prominent in the centre where the veneer would never grow back.

  ‘Those your battle scars?’ he asked.

  I glanced at the nails. ‘No. They got added more recently.’

  ‘So why did you give it all up?’

  I looked at him, then across to Caroline. ‘My wife was dying.’

  A real conversation stopper. They shifted uncomfortably. Caroline turned her gaze back to the table, then picked up her menu. He cleared his throat. Before the silence got too long, Carver reached into his jacket and brought out a photograph. Something moved in his eyes, a sadness, and then he turned it around and placed it in front of me.

  ‘That’s Megan,’ he said.

  When Caroline had originally called, I gave her directions to the office – but she said she wanted to meet somewhere neutral, as if coming to see me was confirmation her daughter was gone for good. After we’d arranged a time and a place, she told me a little about Megan: a good girl, part of a close family, no boyfriends, no reason to leave.

  She’d been gone nearly seven months.

  Two hundred thousand people go missing in the UK each year – thirty thousand in London alone – but the most powerful media story of them all is the young white female from a middle-class, two-parent family. When Megan first disappeared, there was a lot of media coverage: locally, nationally, some of it even playing out abroad. It ran for weeks, one headline after the next, every TV channel in the country reporting from outside the gates of her home. There was a name for cases like hers that unravelled in the full glare of the camera lens: MWWS.

  Missing White Woman Syndrome.

  In the photograph they’d handed me, Megan was sitting with her mum on a beach. The sand was white, flecked with small stones and twigs and falling away to a sapphire sea. Behind Caroline and Megan, playing, was a small boy, probably four years old. He was half turned to the camera, his eyes looking into the hole he was digging.

  Carver pointed at the boy. ‘That’s our son. Leigh.’ He looked at me and could see what I was thinking: there was a thirteen-year age gap between their kids. ‘I guess you could say …’ He glanced at his wife. ‘Leigh was a very pleasant surprise.’

  ‘How old is the photograph?’

  ‘About eight months.’

  ‘Just before she disappeared?’

  ‘Yes, our last holiday together, in Florida.’

  Megan was very much her father’s daughter. She had the same face, right down to identical creases next to the eyes, and was built like him too. Big, but not fat. She was an attractive seventeen-year-old girl: long blonde hair, beautifully kept, and olive skin that had browned appealingly in the sun.

  ‘Tell me what happened the day she went missing.’

  Both of them nodded but made no move to start. They knew this was where it began; the pain of scooping up memories, of going over old ground, of talking about their daughter in the past tense. I got out a pad and a pen as a gentle nudge. Carver turned to his wife, but she gestured for him to tell the story.

  ‘I’m not sure there’s a lot to it,’ he said finally. His voice was unsteady at first, but he began to find more rhythm. ‘We dropped Meg off at school, and when we went to pick her up again later, she didn’t come back out.’

  ‘Did she seem okay when you dropped her off that morning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nothing was up?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Megan didn’t have a boyfriend at the time, is that right?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Caroline said sharply.

  Carver looked at his wife, then squeezed her hand. ‘Not one that she told us about. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.’

  ‘Did she have any boyfriends before then?’

  ‘A couple,’ Caroline said, ‘but nothing serious.’

  ‘Did you meet them?’

  ‘Briefly. But she used to say that when she finally brought a boy home for longer than a few minutes, we’d know it was the real thing.’ She attempted a smile. ‘Hopefully we’ll still get to see that day.’

  I paused for a moment while Carver shifted up the booth and slid his arm around his wife. He looked into her eyes, and back to me.

  ‘She never expressed a need to travel or leave London?’ I asked.

  Carver shook his head. ‘Not unless you count university.’

  ‘What about her friends – have you spoken to them?’

  ‘Not personally. The police did that in the weeks after she disappeared.’

  ‘No one knew anything?’

  ‘No.’

  I picked up the pen. ‘I’ll take the names and addresses of her closest friends, anyway. It’ll be worth seeing them a second time.’

  Caroline reached down to her handbag, opened it and brought out a green address book, small enough to slip into a jacket pocket. She handed it to me.

  ‘All the addresses you need will be in there, including her school,’ she said. ‘That’s Meg’s book. She used to call it her Book of Life. Names, numbers, notes.’

  I nodded my thanks and took it from her. ‘What sort of stage would you say you’re at with the police?’

  ‘We’re not really at a stage. We speak to them once a fortnight.’ Carver stopped, shrugged. He glanced at his wife. ‘To start with we made a lot of headway in a short space of time. The police told us they had some good leads. I guess we got our h
opes up.’

  ‘Did they tell you what leads they had?’

  ‘No. It was difficult for them at the beginning.’ He paused. ‘We put out that reward for information, so they had to field a lot of calls. Jamie Hart told us he didn’t want to give us false hope, so he said he and his team would sort through the calls and collate the paperwork and then come back to us.’

  ‘Jamie Hart was heading up the investigation?’

  ‘Right.’

  The waiter arrived to take our orders as I wrote Hart’s name on my pad. I’d heard of him: once during my paper days when he’d led a task force trying to find a serial rapist; and once in a Times news story I’d pulled out of the archives on a previous case.

  ‘So, did Hart get back to you?’ I asked after the waiter was gone.

  Carver rocked his head from side to side. The answer was no but he was trying to be diplomatic. ‘Not in the way we would have hoped.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘At the beginning, they were calling us every day, asking us questions, coming to the house and taking things away. Then, a couple of months into the investigation, it all ground to a halt. The calls stopped coming as often. Officers stopped coming to the house. Now all we hear is that there’s nothing new to report.’ His mouth flattened. A flicker of pain. ‘They would tell us if there was something worth knowing, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘They should do.’

  He paused for a moment, his hand moving to his drink.

  ‘What was the date of Megan’s disappearance?’

  ‘Monday 3 April,’ Carver said.

  It was now 19 October. One hundred and ninety-nine days and they hadn’t heard a thing. The police tended not to get interested for forty-eight hours after a disappearance, but in my experience the first couple of days were crucial in missing persons. The longer you left it, the more you were playing with percentages. Sometimes you found the person five days, or a week, or two weeks after they vanished. But most of the time, if they didn’t resurface in the first forty-eight hours it was either because they’d disappeared for good and didn’t want to come home again – or their body was waiting to be found.

  ‘When was the last time anyone saw her?’

  ‘The afternoon of the third,’ Carver said. ‘She went to her first class after lunch, but didn’t make the next one. She was supposed to meet her friend Kaitlin at their lockers because they both did Biology. But Megan never arrived.’

  ‘Biology was the last lesson of the day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does the school have CCTV?’

  ‘Yes – but very limited coverage. Jamie told us they checked all the cameras, but none of them revealed anything.’

  ‘Have you told him you’ve come to me?’

  Carver shook his head. ‘No.’

  It was better that way. The best approach was going to be cold-calling Hart. The police, understandably, didn’t like outsiders stepping on their toes – especially on active cases – and if they picked up my scent, they’d close ranks and circle the wagons before I even got near.

  ‘So what’s the next stage?’ Carver asked.

  ‘At a time that’s convenient for you, I’d like to come and speak to you at the house; have a look around Megan’s bedroom. I don’t expect to find anything significant, but it’s something I like to do.’

  They nodded. Neither of them spoke.

  ‘After that, I’ll start working my way through this,’ I said, placing a hand on her Book of Life. ‘The police have had a look at this presumably?’

  ‘Yes,’ Carver said.

  ‘Did they find anything?’

  He shrugged. ‘They gave it back to us.’

  Which meant no. A moment later, the waiter returned with our meals.

  ‘Do you think there’s a chance she’s alive?’ Caroline asked after he was gone.

  We both looked at her, Carver turning in his seat, shifting his bulk, as if he was surprised and disappointed by the question. Maybe she’d never asked it before. Or maybe he didn’t want to know the answer.

  I looked at her, then at him, then back to her.

  ‘There’s always a chance.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘But do you think she’s alive?’

  I looked down at my meal, a lobster broken into pieces, not wanting my eyes to betray me. But I had to look at her eventually. And when I did, she must have seen the answer, because she slowly nodded, then started to cry.

  Outside, James Carver shook my hand and we watched his wife slowly wander off along Victoria Embankment, the Houses of Parliament framed behind her. Boats moved on the Thames, the water dark and grey. Autumn was finally clawing its way out of hibernation after a warm, muggy summer.

  ‘I don’t know what you want to do about money,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s talk tomorrow.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ll be around, but Caroline might not be – she’s got some work at a school in South Hackney.’

  ‘That’s fine. I’ll catch up with her when she’s free.’

  I watched Carver head after his wife. When he got to her, he reached for her hand. She responded, but coolly, her fingers hard and rigid. When he spoke, she just shrugged and continued walking. They headed down to Westminster Pier and, as they crossed the road towards the tube station, she looked back over her shoulder at me. For a second I could see the truth: that something had remained hidden in our conversation; a trace of a secret, buried out of her husband’s sight.

  I just had to find out what.

  The day had started to darken by five-thirty. I stopped in at the office on the way back from the restaurant. I’d left some notes in there, including some I’d made that morning on Megan Carver. By the time I got home, at just gone seven, the house was black. I hadn’t set the alarm, so when I got in the sensors beeped gently as I moved around: first in the kitchen, then in the living room, then in the main bedroom at the end of the hall. I dumped my stuff, showered, and then spent a moment on the edge of the bed, looking at some photographs of Derryn and me.

  One, right at the bottom of the pile, was of the two of us at the entrance to Imperial Beach in San Diego, back when I’d been seconded to the US to cover the 2004 elections. I was pulling her into the crook of my arm, sunglasses covering my eyes, dark hair wet from the surf. In the wetsuit I looked broad, well built and lean, every inch of my six-two. Next to me, Derryn seemed smaller than she really was, as if relying on me to keep her protected from something off camera. I liked the photo. It made me remember what it felt like to be the person she needed.

  I put the pictures back into my bedside cabinet and got dressed, looking around the room at the things of hers that still remained. We’d bought the house when we still had plans to start a family, but as the ink was drying on the contracts, we found out she had breast cancer. Everything seemed to go fast after that. She battled on for two years, but our time together was short.

  Some days I can handle the lack of time, can simply appreciate every moment we had together and be grateful for it. But some days all I feel inside is anger for what happened to her – and for the way I was left alone. On those days I find a way to push that feeling down and suppress it. Because, in the work I do, there are people who come at you through the chinks in your armour.

  And people who feed on that weakness.

  2

  The Carvers’ house was an old Saxon church in Dartmouth Park, overlooking Hampstead Heath. There were three stained-glass windows at the front, and a half-oval oak door that tapered to a point at the top. It was a beautiful building. Vines crawled up the steel-grey brickwork, the roof a mass of dark tile and yellow moss. Two potted firs stood either side of the door. The whole place was set behind imposing gateposts and an attractive gravel drive that curved around to a back garden. There was an intercom on one of the posts outside, but James Carver had already left the gate ajar, anticipating my arrival.

  The gravel was a useful alarm call. Carver looked up as I moved through the gates
, half bent over a bucket of water, washing down the back of a black Range Rover Sport with tinted windows and spotless steel rims. In the double garage behind him was a Ford pick-up with building supplies in the bed and a gleaming red Suzuki motorbike.

  ‘David,’ he said, dropping a sponge into the bucket.

  We shook hands. ‘I like the car.’

  I nodded at the Range Rover, soapsuds sliding down its bumper. He glanced back at it, but didn’t say anything. I figured he was trying to play down the fact that his supercharged five-litre all-terrain vehicle was worth more than some people’s houses. Or maybe he genuinely didn’t care any more. Money didn’t mean a lot when it couldn’t buy back the only thing that mattered to you.

  He ushered me through the front door.

  Inside it was huge. Oak floorboards and thick carpets. A living room that led into a diner that led into a kitchen. The kitchen was open plan, steel and glass, the walls painted cream. Above, the ceiling soared up into an ornate cove, and there was a balcony that ran across three sides of the interior wall, with a staircase up to it. Off the balcony, I could make out two bedrooms and a bathroom.

  ‘You designed this?’

  He nodded. ‘Well, the balcony portion of it. The church has been here a lot longer than any of us.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you. We’ve been very fortunate.’ A pause. The significance of what he’d said hit home. ‘In some ways, anyway.’

  I followed him across to the kitchen.

  ‘You want some coffee?’

  ‘Black would be great.’

  He removed two mugs from a cupboard. ‘I don’t know what you want to do,’ he said, filling both. ‘Megan’s room is upstairs. You’re welcome to head up there and have a look around. Or, if you prefer, I can show you.’

  ‘I might have a look around by myself,’ I said, taking the coffee from him. ‘But I do have some questions for you.’

  ‘Sure.’ He smiled, and I realized it was a defence mechanism. A way to hide the pain. ‘Whatever it takes.’