by Tim Weaver
‘Does she still see him?’
‘He moved up north. She hasn’t seen him for eight years.’
Our meals arrived a few minutes later. ‘So what about you?’ she asked, as we started eating.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Did you ever think about starting a family?’
‘We talked about it a lot, especially when we hit our thirties. I always imagined my work would put me off wanting to have kids – all the tragedy and the heartbreak I got to see – but it never did. We definitely always wanted them. In the end, though, Derryn found out she had cancer and … well, it became less important.’ I smiled at her, letting her know everything was fine. She seemed to understand the gesture, but I could tell the conversation had led somewhere neither of us wanted it to go. I made an attempt to redirect it: ‘My mum used to tell me she loved me more than anything in the world – but that I’d put her off having another baby for the rest of her life.’
Liz smiled. ‘Really? So you’ve always been naughty then?’
‘Apparently they could never find my heartbeat when she was pregnant.’
‘So, what – you’re a vampire?’
I laughed. ‘Not a vampire. But definitely a pain in the arse.’
‘When did your folks pass on?’
‘Mum was just over five years ago. When I was young, my dad used to take me out shooting in the woods close to our farm. Dad had this whole thing about me being a marksman in the army. When I became a journalist and crushed his dream, I agreed to go shooting with him on Sunday mornings as often as I could get down to see them. One morning we got back to the house and mum was lying on the bench outside the house. She’d had a stroke. Dad died a couple of months later.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I shrugged. ‘It’s weird. The only time it ever really registered with me that my parents were getting old was when they talked about their age. I never really noticed otherwise.’
‘You must miss them.’
‘Yeah, I do.’
‘Do you ever get over that feeling?’
‘You want the honest answer?’
She nodded.
‘When you love someone, I’m not sure you do.’
I left Liz chatting to the owner while I walked to get the car. The rain had eased off, but there was still a chill in the air. The BMW was parked close to a cemetery and in view of the motorway, cars flashing past beneath a permanent orange glow.
‘David.’
I turned around, my key in the door. On the other side of the road, just coming out of a pub, were Jill and Aron. They crossed the road towards me.
‘Wow,’ Jill said, smiling as they approached. ‘Talk about coincidence!’
I shook hands with Aron. ‘How are you guys?’
‘We’re good,’ Aron replied.
Jill held up her mobile. ‘I tried calling you earlier, but you weren’t picking up. I figured you were busy with work.’
I fished in my pocket for my phone. It wasn’t there. Then I remembered I’d left it on the bed at home.
‘That’s because, brilliantly, I’ve forgotten to bring it with me.’
Aron smiled. ‘Forty – it happens to us all.’
Jill laughed. ‘Oh well, never mind. I was just calling to see if you wanted to come out for a drink. Remember I mentioned it?’
‘Oh, of course.’
I did remember. I hadn’t purposefully forgotten, but I was glad to have gone out to dinner with Liz instead. Even from the limited conversations I’d had with them both, it was obvious their friendship was developing in a way both of them were enjoying. I didn’t want to get between that.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, lying. ‘That would have been great.’
‘Next time maybe,’ Jill said.
I glanced at Aron. He was smiling, and looked as if he wasn’t worried whether I said yes or no. If it was for show, or to avoid making me uncomfortable, he was doing a good job.
‘Next time,’ I said.
‘I wanted to thank you, actually, David,’ Aron said.
‘Really?’
‘For going round to see Jill the other night.’ He looked at her. She smiled at him. ‘I was up in Manchester at a work function, and had my phone off all night.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
‘It does matter,’ he replied softly. He turned back to me. ‘Anyway, I wanted to thank you for stepping in and helping out.’
I held up a hand. ‘Really. It was nothing.’
‘Well, it was very good of you.’
I nodded at him. ‘Can I give you guys a lift somewhere?’
‘Oh, no, don’t worry,’ Jill said.
‘It’s only about a quarter of a mile to my place,’ Aron added, nodding across the cemetery to where a bank of newly built homes had gone up on the other side. ‘You should come over one day. We can celebrate the onset of old age together.’
I smiled. ‘I like to live in denial.’
‘Then we can live in denial together.’
I shook his hand, but Jill seemed hesitant as I turned to her. I’d promised her I’d make a few calls, though had also said it would be after I cleared the Carver case. It had only been a day since I’d offered. But I could understand her impatience. She wanted to know what happened to Frank, and she didn’t want to have to wait now she’d found someone willing to help. I’d left a message with an old contact of mine, who used to work in the National Criminal Intelligence Service before they became part of SOCA. But I hadn’t chased it up.
‘I haven’t forgotten about Frank,’ I said.
‘Oh, thank you so much.’
I nodded to them both, said goodbye again and got into the BMW. As I headed back to the restaurant to pick up Liz, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw them side by side, laughing at something, fading into the night.
Liz offered to make me a cup of Kona coffee from the packet I’d bought her so, after parking the car, I wandered around to hers. One of the sofas had folders and loose legal papers scattered across it. I sat down on the second one and could see books with names like The Dictionary of Law and Solicitor Advocate stacked up by the fireplace. She came back in, armed with two coffees, sat down next to me and glanced at the books.
‘Fascinating, huh?’
I took one of the mugs. ‘I think I’m too terrified to find out.’
‘Fortunately I’ve got a photographic memory.’ She winked. ‘Actually, that’s not true. But I do seem to be good at remembering lots and lots of really boring, really technical things.’
‘So if I’m a vampire, does that make you … a robot?’
She laughed – and then a momentary silence settled between us. ‘Thanks for the meal tonight,’ she said.
‘Thank your friend.’
‘No, I mean …’ She paused, took a sip from her mug. ‘I mean, thanks for asking me out. I know you didn’t have to.’
‘I didn’t have to – but I wanted to.’
She nodded. ‘I know how hard this must be.’
I looked at her. Her eyes were dark. She moved a hand to her face and tucked some hair behind one of her ears, and I felt a sudden, unexpected pull towards her.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
I put down my coffee. Liz followed my hand, then looked back up at me. I placed my fingers on hers and eased her mug from her grasp, putting it down next to mine.
Then, slowly, I leaned in and kissed her.
At first she backed away a little, her mouth still on mine, as if she didn’t want me to feel like I had to. Then, as I moved a hand to the back of her head and pressed her in harder against me, she responded. We dropped back on to the sofa, me on top of her, feeling her contours and her shape beneath me. I breathed in her scent as we kissed, one of her legs moving between mine. She moaned a little, and a feeling raced through me, like every nerve ending in my body was firing up. When I looked at her, she was staring up at me, her eyes sparking.
And that was wh
en I broke off.
Slowly, the look dissolved in her face.
‘I’m so sorry, Liz.’
She reached for one of my arms and squeezed it. ‘You don’t have to be sorry,’ she said gently, but I could see the disappointment in her eyes. Derryn flashed in my head, a series of images that were there and then gone again: the night I first met her, the day we married, the two of us on a beach in Florida, and then at the end of her life – wrapped in sweat-stained sheets – as she lay dying in our bed. I shifted closer to Liz and apologized again, but I’d razed the moment, and what remained between us was exactly what had always been there.
My doubts. My fears. My guilt.
23
When I woke at nine the next morning, the house was cold. I started the fire in the living room and put on some coffee. While I was waiting for it to brew, I padded back through to the bedroom to find my phone. It said I’d missed two calls. The first had been from Jill, as expected, at eight the previous evening. I’d also got a text from her: Hi David. We’re meeting in the Lamb in Acton, at 8.30. See you there? Jill. The second missed call was from Ewan Tasker at 7.55 a.m.
Tasker was the contact I’d mentioned in passing to Jill. He was working for the Metropolitan Police now, in an advisory role, but previous to that he’d been part of the National Criminal Intelligence Service, before it was assimilated into SOCA. Like the other sources from my paper days, our relationship was built on being mutually beneficial, but over ten years we’d gradually become good friends. The last time I saw him was at his sixtieth birthday almost a year previously. He’d held it in a golf club in Surrey. We sat by the windows, looking out at the course, both of us nursing whiskies. He was mourning the onset of his sixties. I was mourning the death of my wife.
I tried returning the call, but no one answered, and I allowed my thoughts to quickly turn back to Megan, the man in the nightclub – and Milton Sykes.
In the spare bedroom I booted up the computer, logged on to the internet and printed out everything I could find on Sykes. I wanted as much information as I could get on his life, his upbringing, his crimes and his arrest. I wasn’t sure how it fitted into what I had, but the obvious physical similarities between Sykes and the man in Tiko’s couldn’t be ignored – and neither could the idea of a copycat. I noted down the most important information and moved carefully through the rest, making sure nothing was missed. When I was done on the first read-through, I flipped back to the start and reread it. Then a third time. Two hours later, I had sixteen pages of notes.
I turned back to the computer and logged into my Yahoo. There was an email waiting. It was sent from Terry Dooley’s home address: no subject line, no message, but a PDF attachment. I dragged it to the desktop and opened it up. It was the missing-person’s file Colm Healy had set up for his daughter, and a few miscellaneous pages tagged on to the end covering the subsequent search for her.
I started going through it.
Leanne Healy disappeared three months before Megan, on 3 January. She was older, at twenty, and not nearly as capable at school. She’d left at sixteen with middling results, and gone to college to study Beauty and Holistic Therapies, before dropping out after six months. From there she got a job in a local supermarket, which she stuck for another year and a half, then went back to college, this time to do a National Diploma in Business. She completed the course two years later with decent, if unspectacular, grades, and had spent the time between the end of her course and the date she disappeared struggling to find work. On 2 January she’d finally got something: as a full-time office junior at a recruitment agency. Twenty-four hours later, she was gone.
Physically she wasn’t too dissimilar to Megan. Neither of them were overweight, but they definitely weren’t skinny girls. They had a nice shape to them, but their height – five-five to five-six – would have prevented them from turning heads in the way they might have done at a few inches taller. Megan was definitely the better-looking of the two. She had a natural warmth, obvious in her pictures, which added to her attractiveness. Leanne looked harder work, and less inclined to make the effort, which came across in the only photograph in the file; she was standing outside a house, straggly blonde hair covering part of her face. In the light, and because of the fuzzy quality of the picture, her smile looked more like a scowl.
Surprisingly, Healy’s version of the events leading up to Leanne’s disappearance didn’t differ all that much from his wife Gemma’s. Neither account mentioned him hitting her, although Gemma said he’d become ‘angry and aggressive’ when he found out she’d been having an affair. Healy himself tried to claim the moral high ground early on in his own statement, talking about the sanctity of marriage, before admitting he ‘may have scared’ his wife when she told him the truth about her affair. He described ‘getting a little closer to her’ than he should have done, and ‘swearing at her’. At one point, midway through the transcript, Gemma told her interviewer, ‘If Colm dedicated as much time to his family as his work, Leanne probably wouldn’t have left that night.’
The last person to see Leanne alive was one of her brothers. They’d been home together on the afternoon of Sunday 3 January, watching a DVD. In the middle of it, Leanne told him she needed to pop out. She left at three-thirty, and never came home again. At eight, her brother called Gemma, who was at a friend’s house having dinner, and told her what had happened. Gemma phoned Healy, who was at work. Seven hours later, Healy called in her disappearance, and she was registered as a missing person.
Right at the back of the file was a black-and-white MISSING poster, the same photo of Leanne in the corner. Leanne Healy. Age at disappearance: 20. Leanne has been missing from St Albans, Hertfordshire, since 3 January. Her whereabouts remain unknown. There is growing concern for her welfare. Leanne is 5ft 6in tall, has shoulder-length blonde hair, blue eyes and is of medium build. After that it listed a confidential helpline number and, right at the bottom of the page, a list of places she most often went before her disappearance.
The list of places were mostly pubs and clubs, as well as the address of the college she’d gone to, and the name of a coffee shop just around the corner from her parents’ house, where she’d spent most Saturday mornings studying in the run-up to her exams. But then, in among them, I spotted a name and address I recognized: Barton Hill Youth Project, 42 Chestnut Road, Islington, London.
The same youth club Megan had gone to.
And the place she’d met the man who’d got her pregnant.
The Hole
Sona woke. The first thing she could see was a line of light above her, about an inch wide and maybe six feet in length. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realized she was lying on a mattress in some kind of hole. It had a dirt floor and brick walls, water trails running down them. Above her, out of reach, was a trapdoor. The thin line of light was where it didn’t fit properly against the mouth of the hole.
The hole must have been eight feet deep. It was cut out of the floor, and through the sliver of light above she could see snatches of a steel cabinet, a sink and a clear bottle of something sitting on a counter.
It looked like some kind of utility room.
‘Help me!’
No sound came back. No response. No movement. She got to her feet, using the wall for support, and then stopped for a moment: her head still throbbed, and she could feel bruising around her jaw. She closed her eyes, trying to compose herself, then started circling the hole, angling her head in order to get a better look at what was beyond the trapdoor. All she could see were parts of the same unit: more of the steel sink, more of the same cabinet. Nothing else. No shadows shifting. No sign of life.
‘Mark!’
Silence.
‘Mark, please!’
More silence.
This time she screamed until her voice gave way, until her heart was racing in her chest – beating a rhythm against her ribcage – and tears were blurring her vision. After she wiped them away, she closed her eyes and saw
him there in the darkness: lying next to her in her bed and then leading her into the woods.
Bzzzzzz.
Her eyes snapped open.
A noise from above. She reached up, her fingers clawing at the walls, nails dragging through the water trails. ‘Help me! I’ve been kidnapped! Help me!’
Then everything – her voice, the water against her fingers, the gentle buzz from somewhere up above – was drowned out by the sound of feedback. It burst from the walls of the room above the hole, turned up so loud it was distorting whatever speaker it was being piped from. She covered her ears. Even eight feet under the ground, it was like having her face glued to an amp the size of a house.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.
And the trapdoor shifted away from the hole.
Her heart shifted, the noise still ringing in her ears, and a flutter of fear took flight through her chest. When she swallowed it felt like shards of glass were passing into her stomach.
‘Hello?’
The trapdoor came away completely and the room appeared. She could see the rest of the steel cabinet extending across the length of an entire wall. A bare wall next to that, a huge crack running down it. Another sink. A glass-fronted bathroom cabinet, full of pill bottles. A red door, the paint blistered, with a glass panel in it. It was open, but there was only blackness beyond. From the top of the trapdoor cover, a rope snaked off, into the dark of the doorway.
‘Hello?’ Sona said again.
Out of the darkness of the door came a small, transparent plastic tube. It hit the floor of the room above her, rolled across it and tumbled into the hole. She caught it. The tube was about six inches long and packed with cotton wool. She looked up.
‘Mark?’
Something else emerged from the black of the doorway. It rolled across the floor, over the lip of the hole and fell towards her. It made a dull whup sound as it landed.
A plastic bottle.
She picked it up. Inside was a pale blue liquid, the consistency of water. There were no other labels on the bottle, just a handwritten message: Apply ALL of it to your face, then throw it back up.