The David Raker Collection

by Tim Weaver

  ‘No problems?’

  ‘Speak to Rob, his brother. See if he says anything different. Sam may have said something to him – you know, brother to brother – but somehow I doubt it.’

  I changed tack. ‘He didn’t ever complain about feeling unwell?’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘In any sense.’ I nodded towards the last picture she’d taken of him, thin and pale. ‘I just want to be sure I’m not missing anything.’

  She shook her head. ‘Sam didn’t get ill much. And when he did, he rarely let it affect him. He even went into work when he had shingles.’

  ‘Any favourite places you guys used to go to?’

  She thought about it, but not for long. ‘Not really. At least, not the kind of place he might disappear to. We liked to holiday, but that all stopped after I lost my job.’

  ‘Did he owe any cash to anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any problems with alcohol or drugs?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Anyone he fell out with in those last six months?’

  Again, she shook her head.

  I’d been through the list of names she’d given me, and the two best angles seemed to be his brother and his work. Julia had painted a picture of a reliable, decent man, one not prone to big mood swings or changes in character. Yet something had altered. In his work, in how he dealt with his wife, he changed completely in the half-year before he vanished. He got secretive. Stressed. Lost weight. And, ultimately, whatever had been eating away at him was enough for him to leave one morning in the middle of December and never come home again.

  10

  At the top of the stairs, there were three doors. The first opened up into a small, smartly decorated bathroom, all black slate tiles and chrome fixtures. Adjacent to that was a spare room that probably looked the same the day the two of them moved in: plain cream walls, curtain poles without any curtains attached, no furniture except for a desk and a leather chair, and a PC. The third was their bedroom. It was small but unusual: the ceiling was slightly slanted, dropping down the closer to the window it got, and a series of shelves had been built into a V-shaped alcove on the far wall. The room looked out over angled red roofs to a residents-only park, gated and locked, and dominated by huge oak trees. It was hot and stuffy: the window was closed, and sunlight was streaming in across the bed.

  All of Sam’s clothes were still in his wardrobe, but everything he’d once owned was a mess: shoes were piled up at the bottom, clothes were half on hangers. Julia had left it exactly as it was; all she’d done was close the doors and seal it off from the world. I turned to his bedside table. Inside one of the drawers were four different novels by four different authors, each with a bookmark about halfway in. In the next drawer down was a shoebox full of gimmicky boy toys: corkscrews, alarm clocks, beer mats, battery-powered lumps of plastic that looked like they’d come from an expensive Christmas cracker. She’d called him spontaneous – but, in missing persons, spontaneity meant you didn’t place a lot of importance on routine. It meant you were impulsive, moved around, started things but didn’t finish them. Four half-finished books also suggested he was finding it difficult to concentrate.

  Sam wasn’t a creature of habit, and that would immediately make him harder to find. People who thrived on routine left a footprint: the same route in and out, the same stop-off’s along the way. It seemed likely he’d thought about disappearing in advance, because you didn’t just walk away from a marriage, a home and a job on a whim. But I doubted he’d made the decision to actually follow through with it until he got up on the morning of 16 December. There were big question marks, though: why didn’t he take any money with him? Why was he working so late for no obvious reward? And how did he exit a train without being caught on film?

  Underneath the bed were some empty suitcases, a box of dusty LPs and a pile of photo albums. I pulled the albums out and started to go through them. They were the trips abroad Julia had mentioned: New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Prague. Not a beach in sight. City breaks would have suited Sam’s working life as they’d mean less time out of the office. They probably also suited the type of person he was. Seven days on a sunlounger would have driven him insane.

  Sliding the albums back under the bed, I did a last circuit – going over everything again – and then made my way across the landing to the spare room. Thankfully, it was cooler. Sam’s PC was Alienware, built for gaming, and on top of the hard drive were a pile of games. I sat down and booted it up.

  On the desktop was a folder, created three months before, where Julia had placed all of Sam’s files. Word docs, spreadsheets, gaming software and a couple of illegally downloaded films. I fired up the web browser and started going through the history. Most of the recent pages shared a similar theme: my cases. A tabloid account of one I’d had the October before showed a picture of me emerging from my house:

  He’s a private investigator who doesn’t waste his time trying to trap cheating spouses and get to the bottom of insurance scams. Instead, publicity-shy Raker is an action man who has been labelled ‘Mindhunter’ for his ability to track down some of the country’s most vicious criminals.

  It was a complete lie. No one had ever called me that or was ever likely to, but I understood why Julia Wren needed to believe it.

  As I continued to move through the internet history, there was a jump of three months, presumably between the first time Julia had started searching for someone to help find Sam, and the last time Sam had used the computer. He’d custom-set his internet history so that it remembered the last 350 pages, regardless of how far back they were logged. The date of Sam’s last session was 11.12 p.m. on 15 December – the night before he vanished – and the last site he’d been to was an Arsenal fan forum. Not exactly indicative of a man contemplating his disappearance – if he was even contemplating it in the first place. There was always, in the background, the possibility that something else had happened to him. An accident. A desperate decision. Something worse than both. No evidence supported those theories, and nothing so far backed them up. But, as I scanned the rest of the links in his internet history, the idea didn’t entirely fade.

  11

  Once I was back home, I returned to the CCTV footage. This time, rather than watch it in Quicktime, I opened the Gloucester Road video in a custom-built film-editing suite Spike had passed on to me during one of my first cases. In that one I’d been trying to spot a woman entering her place of work in some footage I’d shot, but she’d been so far away all I could see was a vague blur. The software, built by Spike, allowed me to select a portion of the video and zoom in for a closer look. The quality of the recording didn’t become better – in fact, it became much worse, which was the reason I didn’t use it a lot – but, once you’d pinpointed the person you wanted to track, it allowed you to follow them more easily, even if all they were at that kind of magnification was a blur of pixels.

  I selected the area around Sam and then used the zoom function, stopping about 50 per cent of the way in. The quality of the recording deteriorated, and his features became less defined, but by cutting out the noise around him – the other people, the detail of the Tube station – I was able to follow him on to the train before he disappeared from view. This was the point at which I’d lost him the first time. Now, though, the zoom function allowed me to identify a thin red tag on his briefcase – little more than eight or nine pixels in length – and a couple of seconds after vanishing, the briefcase, along with the red tag, reappeared: Sam was standing midway inside the carriage, hidden behind a sea of legs.

  But he was there.

  The briefcase and his legs were all that was visible, which was why I’d missed it the first time: his trousers were the same colour as 95 per cent of those around him, and without the red tag it would have been impossible to tell which briefcase belonged to him. I inched the video on a frame and the doors started to close. At the very last minute another commute
r made a dive for the doors and managed to sneak on, and after that Sam finally did disappear from view: his legs, his briefcase, any indication of where he was in the carriage. My impressions from the first watch were right: there was no way he could have moved from where he was. There were too many people around him, too much traffic either side to transfer between carriages, which meant, when he moved between stations on the Circle line, he would be in the same place. And I’d have the red tag.

  At South Kensington and Sloane Square I struggled to make him out, but when the train pulled into Victoria I picked up the briefcase again. He’d shifted position, closer to the doors. He was half turned, luckily with the red tag facing out towards the camera, but he was definitely still on the train, standing still as people got off and on around him.

  I moved on to St James’s Park.

  And that was when he disappeared.

  The carriage was still packed, so – again – it was unlikely he could have swapped to the ones either side of his, but I couldn’t see the tag, or anything recognizable as Sam. I moved to Westminster: played it and replayed it, magnifying the open doors of the carriage further with the zoom function. Nothing. At Westminster there was more going on – a bigger crowd, Tube staff funnelling protesters, then the fight – and, at one point, Sam’s carriage even emptied a little as people stepped out to see what was going on further up the platform. That was the point at which he should have been visible, even without the zoom on.

  But I couldn’t see him anywhere.

  I paused it and moved between passengers: those at the doors of the carriage looking out at the fight, and then the clumps of protesters stepping around them. Beyond that, a few remained inside. A man in a suit, his face buried in a book. Another demonstrator in a red shirt with checked sleeves, reaching down to pick up a protest sign. A woman with headphones on, blissfully unaware of everything. Through the scratched, reflective glass of the carriage, it was difficult to make out their faces, but I knew instantly neither of the men left behind were Sam. Both of them were taller, weightier and older, dressed differently with different colour hair. And as the footage moved on, the second man – the protester – left the carriage anyway, sign hoisted up, moving quickly to catch up with the others.

  Somewhere, somehow, I’d managed to lose Sam.

  As I got to Hammersmith for the second time with no further sign of Sam, the house was starting to get dark. I glanced at the clock: 9.30. I was fried. I closed the footage and shut down the Mac, then showered. As the cool water ran down my face, my mind rolled back once again to what I’d seen, and then over everything Julia Wren had said earlier. I didn’t need to have seen him on the footage to move things on: I already had Sam’s work, his brother and the obvious loss of weight. The case was already shifting, and would do so with or without the recording. But the video was a useful starting point and, in an odd way, a symbolic one; a means of zeroing in on Sam’s physical location that day, and – in the moment he exited the train, wherever that might have been – a way to get inside his head.

  By choosing a station to leave at, he would have given me a compass bearing for that area of the city, and while it might not have led me to him, it would have given me an advantage. But most of all it would have helped erase the impossible: that a man really could step on to a train and then – three stops later – disappear into thin air.

  12

  As I entered Liz’s house there was the smell of coffee and perfume and the buzz of the electric shower along the hallway. Her living room was understated but stylish: an open fireplace, two black leather sofas, a TV, a huge bookcase; and then a potted palm, big and out of control, which looked like it belonged on a Caribbean island.

  I went to the kitchen, got two mugs from the cupboard and poured some coffee, then padded through to the bedroom. She’d finished showering and was drying herself off, steam pouring off her, condensation on every surface. I announced my arrival by singing the Psycho shower-scene music.

  She smiled. ‘Very funny.’

  ‘It’s like a volcano in here.’

  Rolling her eyes, she hung her towel on the door, and started hunting around in her drawers for underwear.

  ‘How was your day?’ I asked.

  ‘I was defending that hit-and-run driver.’

  She looked at me, her opinion on him clear to see. Even outside of the courtroom, in the privacy of her own home, she maintained a kind of dignified silence. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to discuss her cases with me, more that she preferred not to judge people, even if sometimes – like tonight – it was hard not to. I liked that quality in her.

  ‘And yours?’

  ‘It was okay.’

  She looked at me. ‘Just okay?’

  I put her coffee down and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘So this guy I’m trying to find gets on at Gloucester Road and then disappears. Just …’ I looked at her. It sounded strange saying it out loud. ‘Vanishes.’

  ‘How do you vanish from the inside of a train?’

  I shrugged. ‘That’s just the point. You don’t. You can’t. He must have got off at some point – but I can’t see where. I’ve been over the footage twice today.’

  ‘No sign of him?’

  ‘Nothing after Victoria.’

  ‘He’ll turn up.’ She sat down on the bed and squeezed me, then shifted slightly, as if she’d suddenly remembered something. ‘Oh, I bumped into an old friend of yours today.’

  ‘I didn’t realize I had any left.’

  Another smile formed on her face. ‘He was giving evidence in one of the other courtrooms.’

  ‘Who was the friend?’

  ‘Colm Healy.’

  His name made me pause.

  The last time I’d seen Healy was at the funeral of his daughter the previous November. He’d been in a bad way at the time: emotionally damaged, physically broken, estranged from his wife and suspended from his job at the Met. In the weeks before he buried his girl, we’d formed an uneasy alliance, one built not on trust, but on necessity, as we both came to realize we were hunting the same man.

  ‘Did you say hello?’

  ‘Yes. He passed on his best.’

  ‘Is he back on the force?’

  ‘Since 9 January. He said he’d had to suck up a demotion.’

  ‘But he seemed okay otherwise?’

  Liz looked up at me. ‘He seemed better.’

  He couldn’t have been much worse. Healy had gone against all the rules of his profession to find his daughter. In the interviews afterwards, police had accused me of feeling a kinship for him, using it as a stick to beat me with, a way of cornering me. But they’d failed to understand the relationship. We’d caught a monster – a murderer who’d eluded police for years – and, in order to do that, in order to go as far as we had, there had to be something deeper tethering us to each other. The police thought it was that I felt sorry for him.

  But it was more than that.

  Until you’d buried the most important person in your life, it was difficult to understand how grief forged a connection between people. Yet, ultimately, that was what had happened with Healy and me. I didn’t trust him, in many ways didn’t even really like him, but we each saw our reflection in the other, and – as we tried to stop a killer who had preyed on us both – that had been enough.

  13

  23 January | Five Months Earlier

  The grass around the front of the building was still covered in frost and, in the sky above, unmarked by cloud, a pair of seagulls squawked, drifting beyond the walls of the prison. There was a faint breeze in the air, carried in from the Thames, but otherwise it was still.

  Healy passed through the front entrance and waited in line at security. Ahead of him, a man in his seventies was being patted down, a prison officer’s hands passing along both legs. The old man’s coat, jacket, belt and shoes were already sitting in a tray on the other side of an X-ray machine, and – once he was done being searched – he had a door-shaped metal detec
tor to contend with. A second prison officer lay in wait beyond that, looking like he’d come off the same production line as the one doing the rub-down: shaved head, moustache, semi-aggressive.

  The old man was still putting on his shoes by the time Healy was done. In the corridor ahead were a series of lockers where visitors were asked to store all personal possessions. Healy made a show of switching off his phone, and opened one of the locker doors. But he didn’t put anything inside.

  He wasn’t planning on staying.

  A couple of minutes later, as he pretended to check his phone, he saw her emerge through a security door. She was wearing a visitor’s badge on her front and holding a slip case. As he watched her, he felt a prickle of anger form at the bottom of his throat, but then she seemed to sense she was being watched and looked vaguely in his direction. He stepped in front of the open locker door and disappeared from view.

  A few seconds later, he leaned back out and saw that she was chatting with one of the prison guards. There was a smile on her face that pissed Healy off, as if nothing was on her mind. As if she’d forgotten where she’d just come from and who she’d been talking to. He’d missed her the week before because she’d been finished by the time he’d fought his way through London traffic – but he hadn’t missed her this week. He’d made sure of that.

  Now he needed to get to know her.

  He needed to get a fix on her routines, her habits, her quirks, her route into and out of this place.

  And when he knew all that, when he was sure, then he’d move in for the kill.

  An hour later, Healy pulled his Vauxhall up outside the station. He killed the engine and glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror. He’d hardly slept the night before, knowing he was due at the prison early, and it showed in his eyes and in his face. He’d told Craw that he was going to the doctor, and maybe she’d believe that for a while. But she was smart. She’d see it in him. And, after a while, she’d realize it wasn’t a lack of sleep that was getting to him. It was the anger and resentment.