The David Raker Collection

by Tim Weaver

  Except, now, imagine was all you could do.

  Glass had been halfway through surgery when she’d woken up. Pale blotches covered much of her face, like dye spreading beneath her skin. Both cheeks were entirely bleached. Even whiter lines had formed in the creases in her forehead and in the gentle cleft of her chin, as if something had run across her face and collected there. And it had spread to her neck too, along the ridges of her throat. A scar followed her hairline on the right side of her face, and a second one in the same position on her left. There was bruising too, where the blotches hadn’t formed: at the bridge of her nose it was almost black, like the advanced stages of frostbite; and under both eyes purple-blue smears moved down into her cheeks. Her eyes fell on me, chips of blue stone, narrowing slightly as if waiting for me to react to the sight of her. I nodded once, smiled, but didn’t break my gaze. She stepped back from the door, glanced at Healy and invited us both in.

  Immediately inside was a thin hallway that opened out into a living room, three other rooms leading from it. The first was the kitchen. Plates were piled in the sink, one on top of the other. The next was a bedroom with only a bed and a stand-alone wardrobe. The last was the bathroom. The extractor fan was still on as we came in, condensation on the mirrors and her towel lying in the middle of the floor.

  The living room was sparse: two sofas, both of which looked about five years past their sell-by date, and a television on a cardboard box, leads snaking off to a Sky decoder on the floor behind it. There was a small coffee table in the corner. Books were stacked up on it, in two piles: ones that looked as if they’d been read, and ones that looked new. A magazine lay on the floor between one of the sofas and the TV, a crossword puzzle half filled in. There was a laptop as well. It’s where the tap tap had come from. On the screen I could see she’d done a Google search for my name. The first hit had taken her to the BBC website, where a news report recounted what had happened on my case before Christmas. There was a photo of me leaving a police station, flanked by Liz.

  She dropped back on to one of the sofas. Next to her was a remote control. She picked it up and turned off the TV.

  We both sat.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Healy asked, smiling again. It was weird seeing him like this. Smiling didn’t seem to come easily to him, but he was a convincing Mr Nice Guy.

  ‘Okay,’ she said quietly.

  She looked between us, waiting for us to react to her face. When no reaction came, she nodded at a sheet of paper on top of the TV. It was the list of names she’d been referring to. From where I was sitting, it looked like there were only about six. At the top were the words Operation Gaslight. At the bottom, in the same handwriting: These people ONLY.

  ‘Why aren’t you on the list?’ she said to Healy.

  Healy looked at me, and then back at Sona. He sat forward. ‘Okay, truth time. I’m on the task force, but I’m on the outside. Not as far in as I’d like to be.’

  A flash of fear in her face.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, holding up a hand. He paused, glanced at me. Another pause, as if unsure whether to commit himself. ‘Nine months ago, my daughter was taken – just like you.’

  Her expression changed; the embers of the fear fading, replaced by a flicker of surprise. She looked between us but didn’t say anything.

  ‘I know the man who took you, took her. I knew it as soon as we got to you. I knew it was the same prick …’ He stopped. ‘Sorry.’

  Sona just nodded.

  ‘Anyway, a week ago, David was approached by the family of Megan Carver to look into her disappearance. When that happened – when I found out some of the things he’d discovered – I realized it was time to do something. It was time to find this guy. Because no one else cared about finding my girl. They think she ran away from home because …’ He paused again, took a sideways glance at me. ‘Because we weren’t getting on so well as a family.’

  I turned to Healy as he was talking, surprised he was being so honest. Maybe he figured Sona had been lied to enough. Everything Markham had fed her. Everything Phillips and Hart were making her believe. Or maybe he saw it as the best way to get her to talk. Problem was, Sona wasn’t an ordinary victim, and Healy wasn’t an ordinary detective. He was personally invested in her answers, and he needed her much more than she needed him. She was quiet and introspective, driven into her shell by the man who had taken her, and bringing her back out again could take weeks. We had hours.

  ‘So,’ he said, picking up the conversation again, ‘in order to find him, in order to stop this, I was wondering whether we could go over some of what happened to you.’

  He got the reaction I expected: nothing. She looked away, over to the laptop, where the picture of Liz and me still showed.

  Healy leaned forward, trying to soften his face. ‘Sona?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ she said.

  He glanced at me. ‘Okay.’ He readjusted himself, preparing to come at it again. ‘Maybe we could start with the man who took you. Daniel Markham. I think you used to call him Mark?’

  She flinched a little. But didn’t reply.

  ‘Could you tell me about him, do you think?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Sona?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ she said.

  Healy leaned further forward, but this was going nowhere. The secret was to find the chip in her shield that you could slowly open up in order for everything to pour out. Firing a succession of questions at her, or rephrasing the same one, wasn’t going to work.

  ‘So, do you remember anything about the day you were taken?’ he asked.

  She was looking off into space.

  ‘Any detail, however small?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Even if you think it’s unimportant?’

  Another prolonged silence. Healy paused. Moved in his seat. I could sense he was getting frustrated, but only because we were really short on time. He’d done thousands of interviews. He could pace himself, or he could go in hard and fast, but normally he didn’t have to keep an eye on the minute hand. The danger here was that the harder he tried to dig in, the less he’d get out of her, and the more the frustration would build. He shuffled right to the edge of the sofa.

  ‘Sona, we just need to stop this guy.’

  She looked down into her lap. We both watched her for a moment, but when she didn’t make a move to engage us, Healy glanced at me. I shook my head. Don’t say anything else. He gave me the look, the one that told me I was overstepping whatever mark he’d made for me in his head. But he was too close to what was happening – he was relying too heavily on her answers – to see why she’d gone back into her shell. In another place, on another case, he may have seen it clearly. But not now.

  ‘You don’t have to feel alone,’ I said.

  She looked up at me. I didn’t take my eyes off her, and she didn’t take hers off mine. This was the chip in her shield.

  ‘It won’t always be like this,’ I continued. ‘You feel betrayed, I understand that. You feel abandoned, and not just by Daniel Markham – by the police as well. You’ve been left here, and you’ve been forgotten about, and all anyone ever seems to want from you are answers.’

  Her eyes flicked to Healy, and then back to me. She leaned forward, crossing her arms, almost hugging herself.

  ‘Meanwhile, you can’t go to sleep at night without fearing that he’s going to come back for you. Because that’s what the police have told you.’

  Finally I moved closer to her, right to the edge of my seat so that our knees were only inches apart. She glanced down and then back up to me.

  ‘But, Sona, let me tell you something: he doesn’t know where you are. He isn’t coming back for you. And you’re completely and absolutely not alone.’

  I moved away from her. She looked at Healy, and then back to me, but didn’t speak. I eyed Healy, telling him not to jump in.

  ‘How do you know he’s not coming for me?’

  Her
voice seemed small after the quiet of what had preceded it. Healy leaned forward again. ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that,’ he said.

  But she was looking at me.

  ‘How do you know he’s not coming for me?’

  ‘He doesn’t know where you are,’ I replied. ‘And he’s not about to find out.’

  She hesitated for a moment, as if the thought of going back would be too painful. Her fingers moved together, sliding around her knee and pulling it into her. An action of protection; subconsciously forming a barrier between us. She glanced off for a second, into the space of the living room. Then her eyes came back to us.

  ‘Okay,’ she said quietly. ‘I guess we should start with Mark.’

  60

  Gradually – very gradually – Sona began to tell us about how she met Markham. She was a receptionist at St John’s Hospital, where Markham had worked, and he’d gone up and started talking to her. He told her he hated the name Daniel, and that most people at the hospital just called him Mark. He wouldn’t have been trying to conceal his identity – everybody at the youth club already knew his real name – so it was likely that when he told Sona about his name he was, for once, telling her the truth.

  He’d probably never looked at her twice before then, even though they’d worked in the same place – but then Glass had discovered her somehow, perhaps after following Markham’s movements in and around the hospital, and he’d told Markham to move in on her. Blonde hair, blue eyes. She fitted his twisted fantasy perfectly.

  Sona revealed how Markham had been nervous and shy to start with, almost as if he was inexperienced with women. But, in truth, he wasn’t shy – he was just being eaten up by the idea of leading another woman into the hands of a psychopath.

  ‘Do you remember the day he attacked you?’ Healy asked.

  She frowned, looking off, running her hand through her hair.

  ‘Not much of it,’ she said quietly. ‘He took me for a picnic because it was my birthday. I think maybe he drugged me or something. I started feeling a bit off when we got there. Like a headache; a pressure between my eyes.’

  ‘You don’t remember where you went?’

  Sona shrugged. ‘He blindfolded me. But I didn’t feel scared. I know it sounds odd him blindfolding me, but it wasn’t like that. Or, at least, it never felt like that. He said he wanted to take me somewhere as a surprise for my birthday. I trusted him completely. We’d been seeing each other for almost six months.’

  Almost six months. That meant Glass had moved Markham on to Sona only days after Megan had been taken.

  ‘What about after the blindfold came off ?’ Healy asked.

  She shook her head. ‘No. I mean, I remember snatches of stuff: he laid a blanket out for us, and had brought a picnic basket. And I remember …’ She paused. A flicker. ‘After he attacked me … I remember looking up at him, and I remember what he said.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said, “I can’t do this any more.” ’

  We both nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a hole in the ground.’

  Sona paused, her eyes fixed off to our right, trying to pull memories out of the darkness. She’d been found three weeks after she’d been taken, and while forensics took urine samples, seventy-two hours was normally the ceiling for IDing anything suspicious. Because of that, the police only speculated on what caused the amnesia. It could have been flunitrazepam, better known as Rohypnol. It would explain the headache and the periods of amnesia. Or it could have been something else. Glass was a surgeon, after all; he would know which drug did what, and how it would protect his plans.

  ‘Going back to the picnic for a second,’ Healy said. ‘Do you remember anything about your surroundings? It doesn’t matter if it seems small or unimportant.’

  ‘Most of it … most of it’s just a blank.’

  ‘You mentioned a blanket,’ I said. ‘Were there a lot of trees?’

  She looked at me. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘We think he took you to a place called Hark’s Hill Woods. Does that name ring any bells with you? Did Markham ever mention it?’

  Silence. Eyes narrowing. Trying to remember.

  Finally, she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, holding up a hand. I stopped for a second, to give her time to resettle. ‘In your statement, one of the things you did mention was hearing things.’

  ‘Yes. Visually, I’ve got this black wall I can’t see past.’ She paused. Touched a finger to her face. ‘But I can remember hearing something.’

  ‘What do you think it was?’

  She stopped for a moment.

  I leaned forward. ‘Sona?’

  She looked up at me. ‘Nothing I can make any sense out of.’

  I looked at Healy and shook my head. We’ll come back to that. The worst thing we could do was try to force her to remember something. If you tried to force an answer, it either drove them further away or it pressurized them into making something up.

  ‘Can I ask you about him?’ I said.

  ‘Mark?’

  ‘No. The man who kept you prisoner.’

  She nodded and shifted a little in her seat. I could smell her perfume briefly, and in the bathroom the extractor fan had finally stopped. Complete silence now.

  ‘Did you get a look at him?’

  ‘Never in daylight, but I saw him a couple of times looking down at me from the edge of that hole.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Dark hair, dark eyes, kind of … ugly, I guess. He had this big forehead, and this horrible smile that looked like it could never … I don’t know, form properly.’

  Healy and I glanced at each other. The Milton Sykes mask.

  ‘Did he speak to you at all?’

  ‘Yes. But always through this microphone thing. There was always static when he spoke. Feedback. He had a series of speakers hooked up inside the place he kept me, and his voice would always come through those. It was …’ She paused. ‘It was frightening. Why do you think he did that?’

  ‘So he could always communicate,’ I said. ‘He could talk to you, scare you, tell you whatever he wanted, and he wouldn’t even have to be in the same room as you.’

  She nodded.

  ‘How did you escape?’ Healy asked.

  ‘I woke up,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t meant to. He’d put me under anaesthetic and was …’ A pause. Cutting me open. ‘But I woke up.’ She peered off behind her for a moment, into the bathroom. ‘Some days I look at myself in the mirror and wish I hadn’t.’

  In the file Healy had given me earlier, it said she had hypopigmentation – a complete loss of skin colour – as a result of a chemical peel that had gone too deep. Phenol and small traces of croton oil had been found in her skin, both of which were used in cosmetic surgery as an exfoliant. Removing the outer layers of skin helped revitalize the face, smoothing out wrinkles in the process. But the peel had burned away too much of Sona’s face and gone much too deep, eliminating colouring and freckles. He’d been preparing her skin for treatment for weeks, asking her to apply a liquid moisturizer twice daily. But the end result had gone horribly wrong.

  And that bothered me.

  Glass may have been a surgeon-for-hire but nothing he’d done so far was amateur. He was meticulous. Exact. Covered his tracks. He would know how far to go when performing a face peel, even if the end results weren’t as good as you’d find for five figures at a west London clinic. So why go as deep as he did? And why perform the surgery in the first place? Did he just like cutting women up? Somehow I doubted it. A man like this had a plan. He operated on women because it served some wider purpose.

  I watched Sona run a finger across her face, over the bridge of her nose and then along the scar at her hairline. Her nose looked horrific but would recover. The scarring at her ears was a blood red, but would do the same. Her file had called the injuries ‘the early stages of rhi
noplasty and a rhytidectomy’: a nose job and facelift. For the nose job, he’d been cutting from the inside and rasping down the hump. It explained the bruising at the bridge. For the facelift, he’d cut in along her hairline, down past the ear and around the ear lobe to the back. The idea was to separate the skin from the tissue and tighten its appearance. Except he’d never got that far because Sona had woken up. She probably knew how lucky she was. A facelift was the most complicated procedure of them all. Hit a nerve, and the next time you open your eyes it looks like you’ve had a stroke.

  ‘What happened after you escaped?’

  She turned back to me. ‘I just ran.’

  ‘Can you describe the place he was keeping you?’

  ‘By that time, my face was …’ She shook her head. ‘It was on fire. And I was scared. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so much pain in my life. One of the doctors at the hospital told me a deep peel like that should be performed under anaesthetic. But I woke up from mine. By the time I found my way out, I didn’t feel numb any more. I felt everything. I could hardly put one foot in front of the other.’

  She looked between us, then took a moment, holding up her hand to apologize. ‘All I remember about the place that he kept me was that it looked like a sewer – except there was nothing running through it. It was all dry. Cleaned out. It looked like it might have been adapted somehow, and he’d built a series of rooms inside it, with big glass windows.’

  ‘Rooms?’

  ‘There was a girl in one of them.’

  ‘Did you get a look at her?’ Healy asked, shuffling across the sofa towards her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was she alive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you see anyone else?’