Vanished dr-3

by Tim Weaver

The Snatcher was Edwin Smart.

  69

  As I drove, I jammed my phone into the hands-free and dialled Healy’s number. It rang and rang, with no answer. Finally, after half a minute, it clicked and went to voicemail.

  ‘This is Healy, leave a message.’

  ‘Shit.’ I waited for the beep. ‘Healy, it’s me. Everything’s changed. It’s not Sam or Pell you should be looking for, it’s a guy called Edwin Smart. He’s a ticket inspector on the Circle line. He took Sam. He took all of them. You need to tell Craw right now.’

  I killed the call, my mind turning over.

  Craw.

  I dialled the station that the Snatcher task force were working out of, then asked to be connected to Craw. ‘She’s out in the field at the moment, sir, and I’m afraid I can’t –’

  ‘Wherever she is, she’s at the wrong place.’

  ‘Well, sir, I can’t –’

  ‘No, listen to me: you need to connect me unless you want her to get back and find out you are the reason she couldn’t stop a killer disappearing for good.’

  A pause. Then the line connected.

  It rang ten times with no answer and then went silent. A click. And then it started to ring again. She was redirecting my call. On the third ring, someone picked up.

  ‘Davidson.’

  Shit. Anyone but Davidson.

  ‘Davidson, it’s David Raker.’

  A snort. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  ‘Sam Wren isn’t the Snatcher.’

  ‘What? I thought we made it clear to you –’

  ‘Just listen to me –’

  ‘No, you listen to me, you weaselly piece of shit. You and that fucking sideshow Healy are done. You get it? He’s cooked, and when he’s done I’m gonna find the hole in your story and I’m gonna hang you out to dry. You think you’re some sort of vigilante, is that it? You’re nothing. Zero. And you’re gonna be even less than that when I’m done.’

  ‘Do what you have to do, but you need to hear this.’

  ‘I need to hear this?’

  ‘Sam Wren isn’t the guy you need to be looking for, it’s a –’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re done.’

  And then he hung up.

  I smashed my fists against the steering wheel and looked out into the rain. Healy’s cooked. Had they found out about him working the case off the books? A fleeting thought passed through my head – a moment where I wondered how he would react to that, and how he might endanger himself and the people around him – and then my mind switched back to Smart. I dialled Directory Enquiries and got them to put me through to Gloucester Road station. After three rings, a woman picked up.

  ‘How can I help you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m looking for a revenue control inspector.’

  ‘You’d be better off calling the depot at Hammersmith.’

  ‘His name’s Edwin Smart.’

  He could have been at any station on the line, not just Gloucester Road. But I’d found him twice there and he seemed to know the people who worked in and around it. They liked him, he liked them – or, at least, he pretended to. But he could put on a show, and he could manipulate those around him, starting with Sam Wren and Duncan Pell.

  ‘Do you know him at all?’ I pressed.

  ‘Edwin Smart?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She paused. ‘What did you say your name was, sir?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Davidson.’

  I could sense a change, without any words even being spoken. Most people, even people who knew they had a duty to protect people’s privacy, started to get nervous when the police came calling. ‘Uh …’ She stopped again. ‘Uh, I’m not really, uh …’

  I recognized the voice then: Sandra Purnell. The woman I’d spoken to in the staffroom, and the woman who had hugged Smart as I’d been about to approach him.

  Something had been up with Smart.

  ‘He’s not in any trouble,’ I said. ‘I just need to speak to him.’

  She cleared her throat. ‘He’s out for the rest of the day.’

  ‘Out on the line?’

  ‘No. He’s doing a half-day.’

  ‘He’s on holiday?’

  ‘Well, it’s 18 June.’

  ‘What’s the significance of that?’

  ‘He always takes 18 June off. It’s the anniversary.’

  ‘Of what?’

  A pause. ‘Of his dad dying.’

  I was heading along Uxbridge Road, waiting for Spike to call me back with an address for Smart. He was exdirectory, with no trail on the internet. No Facebook page. No Twitter feed. No LinkedIn profile. No stories about him in local newspapers. None of the usual ways people left footprints. But as the woman at Gloucester Road told me about his father, something shifted into focus and, as it formed in my head, I pulled a turn into a side road and bumped up onto the pavement in order to let it come together.

  I leaned into the phone. ‘What did his dad die of?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you know what his dad died of?’

  ‘Uh … cancer.’

  I killed the call and sat back in my seat.

  Whatever he was doing with the men after he took them, he was doing because of what his dad had done to him. You didn’t need to be a profiler to work that out. Killers were made, not born; the cycles of abuse rippled through from one generation to the next. But I imagined that when, in Edwin Smart’s childhood, the abuse – in whatever form it got dished out – finally stopped, it was because his father got cancer. And when his father got cancer, he was left with no hair.

  Just like the Snatcher victims.

  He shaved their heads to make them like his father.

  Daddy

  Jonathan Drake woke with a jolt. Darkness all around him, everywhere, in every corner of whatever space he was being kept in. He’d been moved again. Every time he slept, he was shifted around the room. Most times he was conscious of it happening, but he didn’t do anything about it. He was too scared. He just lay there, limp, as the man slid fingers under his naked body, as hands pinched his skin – the feel of them sending goosebumps scattering across Drake’s body – and he pretended he was asleep. It was safer not to fight. Sometimes, though, he wouldn’t know he’d been moved until he woke up. He imagined those times the man had drugged him. Then, when Drake felt in the darkness for the things around him he’d become familiar with, and instead realized there was nothing he could seek comfort in, panic would spread through his body.

  He was face down on the floor this time, stomach in a patch of something wet, ankle bound to the wall behind him. He just lay there, looking off into the dark, trying to force his eyes to form shapes in front of him. But there was nothing, just like every other time. He closed his eyes and listened. He could hear something faintly, but whatever it was it wasn’t coming from outside. The only noises that drifted around the room were those from inside it: the soft sound of electricity, and water dripping rhythmically somewhere close by. Sometimes he listened to the sound and used it to focus his mind, wondering how long he’d been kept here, and what was to come.

  ‘I never got the chance to start on you.’

  Drake moved instantly, up off the floor, scampering back towards the wall on all fours. And then he sat there, knees up at his chest, scanning the darkness. He couldn’t see the man anywhere, but he was there. The voice had sounded like it was right on top of him.

  ‘Jonathan Drake.’

  Drake looked from left to right, desperately trying to seek the man out, his heart clubbing against his chest so hard it felt like it might bruise. Then, on his right, light suddenly erupted about twenty feet away from him. Drake automatically pushed back, reacting to the sudden change, but he was already tight to the wall, unable to go any further. He looped his arms around his knees and squeezed even harder, trying to form a protective barrier.

  Then Drake saw the man.

  There was no light directly on him, just a weak glow, but Drake could make
out a head, a shoulder, part of a body, and a big hand sitting across the torch, turning it gently back and forth so that an arrow of light swung across the floor of the room, side to side.

  ‘Jonathan is such a lovely name,’ the man said, and Drake – just for a moment – thought how ordinary he sounded. No accent. No twang. A softness to his voice that was almost as frightening as if he’d been screaming. ‘My father was also called Jonathan.’

  Drake swallowed. ‘Please. Please don’t –’

  ‘They used to call me “Ed Case” at school.’ A snort of laughter. ‘I was always in trouble. Fighting, causing problems, answering back. I remember getting caned fourteen times once, right across the knuckles, because I told a teacher to fuck off. I guess that’s what happens when you grow up without a mother. She died when I was one, so the old man brought me up. I sometimes wonder if life would have turned out differently if she’d lived. Maybe it would. Or maybe she would also have locked me in the cellar, beaten me senseless, climbed into my bed and made me touch her, like he did.’ The man stopped rolling the torch. ‘Do you know what I don’t understand, Jonathan?’

  ‘Look, whatever you want –’

  ‘Shut your fucking mouth.’

  Nothing in the man’s voice. No emotion. No volume. But there was something about him, about his stillness, that sent a chill fingering up Drake’s spine.

  ‘Do you know what I don’t understand?’ he repeated.

  Silence. Drake didn’t answer this time.

  ‘When I had to take him into hospital for his treatment, when I had to do his shopping, change the TV channel for him, read to him and put him to bed, I looked at him and felt devastated by the thought that he might not be around any more. And yet, when I wasn’t with him, this deep, burning hatred was just eating me up inside.’

  Drake looked around him. The glow from the torch had turned the light up just a notch, but it was still hard to make anything out. When he turned back to the man, he was staring at Drake, eyes black, face cast in strips of shadow.

  ‘It was a different time back then.’

  Drake pressed himself against the wall again.

  ‘No one spoke about those things. I never told anyone what he did to me. What he made me into.’ He started rolling the torch back and forth. ‘A fucking queer.’

  And then he stopped.

  For the first time, Drake noticed the man was gripping something in his other hand, fingers around it, surface shining dully in the muted light. Oh shit. He had a knife. Drake tried to move away, tried to shift sideways, but the shackles tightened, and all he could do was look at the man, his skin crawling, his throat closing up, his eyes fixed on the object in his hand.

  Then he realized it wasn’t a knife.

  It was a set of hair clippers.

  The man reached into the darkness for something else and came back with a wooden bowl. The same one he’d used on Drake the night he’d taken him. He put it down, in between his legs, and leaned forward, so he was over the bowl, looking down at it. And then he placed the clippers against his head, right at the top of his skull where his hair was the thickest, and switched them on. Slowly he moved the shaver through his black hair, eyes on Drake the whole time, creating naked lines on his scalp like rows of ploughed corn. There was no emotion in his face at all. No movement in his body other than his arm passing back and forth across his head. No sound but the mechanical whine of the clippers, a constant buzz that went on for what seemed like hours, hair falling gently into the bowl. Then, finally, when most of the hair was gone, he switched them off.

  Eyes still on Drake.

  He placed the clippers down on the floor beside him and started to unbutton his shirt. He had a taut body, toned, shadows forming in the muscles, a scar running from his right collarbone across his chest in a diagonal. He touched a couple of fingers to it, thick and pink like a worm, as if it bothered him somehow, then he started to undo the belt on his trousers, loosening the buckle and drawing it through the loops, one by one, until the belt was out. He tossed it across the room. He watched Drake the whole time.

  Drake swallowed, hardly able to breathe now.

  Tears formed in his eyes.

  This was the end.

  He wiped them away as the man sat there, muscles hard and defined in his arms, hands big and powerful, his gaze never leaving Drake even once. Drake knew instantly he wouldn’t stand a chance. The man was too powerful.

  ‘Please,’ he begged softly. ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

  But the man said nothing, his skin a tepid yellow in the torchlight. He scooped his clothes up and rolled them into a ball, hurling them across the other side of the room. Then he just sat there, his dark eyes on Drake’s face.

  ‘Please,’ Drake said again, barely able to form the words. A tear broke free and ran down his face. He let it run until it fell away. ‘Please. Please. Don’t hurt me.’

  Finally, the man moved, raising a straightened finger to his lips and holding it there in a sssshhhhh gesture.

  And then the torch went out.

  70

  Edwin Smart’s house was about half a mile from Duncan Pell’s and backed on to the old line at Fell Wood. It was almost on top of it, just beyond the line of trees I’d passed on my way to the Tube station. I’d walked past his house two days before without even knowing. Again, I tried to put it all together in my head: how Pell had first entered the equation, how he and Smart had begun working together, which parts were Pell and which were Smart. But there was nothing but noise around me now as I headed north towards Highgate. Rain hammered against the windows of the BMW. Horns blared. Tyres squealed. Lorries rumbled past. I couldn’t get silence, I couldn’t get the time I needed to piece it together. And then my phone started ringing.

  I reached across and answered it. ‘David Raker.’

  No reply. Then finally: ‘I got your message.’

  ‘Healy?’

  No answer again. But it was him.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘You were right, then.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Wren.’

  ‘It’s not about being right or wrong.’

  ‘It’s always about being right or wrong,’ he replied, his voice so small I could barely even hear it. He sniffed. I tried to make out any sounds in the background but there was nothing but silence. I turned up the volume on the speakerphone as high as it would go, trying to offset the noise of the rain, of the traffic, of a Monday in the middle of the city. ‘So how do you know this Smart guy took Wren?’ Healy asked, but there was nothing in his voice. He didn’t sound invested in the answers, just curious.

  ‘I saw him.’

  ‘On CCTV?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How did you miss him before?’

  ‘He had a handle on everything. Every second of it. He knew where the cameras were, how to disguise himself, how to get Sam out. It was blind luck that I found him.’ Or maybe fate, I thought. If I’d left Gloucester Road five minutes before I did, I’d never have seen Smart again, never talked to him, never seen the T-shirt in his gym bag or made the connection with his father.

  ‘Raker?’

  I filled in the rest of the details for Healy and then pushed the conversation on. ‘He lives in Highgate, close to Pell. I tried to call Craw, but all I got was Davidson. I need you to call her and let her –’

  ‘They’re all over Pell.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tip-off. Caller said they saw someone snooping around Pell’s place.’

  ‘Who was the caller?’

  ‘It was anonymous.’

  ‘Could have been Smart.’

  ‘Could have been. If he’s going to make a break for it, he probably thought the phone call would be enough to buy him a couple of days. You think that’s what he’s going to do – make a break for it?’

  I thought of Smart’s dad, of the anniversary. ‘Not today.’

  More silence. A sniff. ‘So wha
t’s Pell to him?’

  ‘To Smart?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He must be just an insurance policy. A scapegoat. Someone who would look good for all the terrible things Smart had done. Pell’s angry and violent, and Smart would have seen that part of him early on. He probably saw it before anyone else, because a killer recognizes his reflection. When Pell started to go for Leon Spane, started pushing him around and making his life a misery, Smart saw an opportunity. I doubt whether Smart would have killed anyone by that stage, but he would have been thinking about it the whole time, it would have been consuming him, and Spane fitted the bill. He didn’t have a home, didn’t have a family, didn’t have anyone who would miss him. And best of all, if people like me dug deep enough and found that CCTV footage of Pell being violent towards Spane –’

  ‘You’d automatically suspect Pell, not Smart.’

  ‘Right.’

  I stopped, wondering whether to take it any further with Healy, whether it was even worth the effort, and then I realized it was worth the effort for me: I needed to get everything clear in my head, in some sort of order, and thinking aloud was the best way.

  ‘Except Smart’s first kill was a mess,’ I continued. ‘Everything about Spane was a mess. Nothing went to plan. There was none of the control or the finesse Smart showed with the other victims. He must have panicked after killing Spane, which was why he dumped him.’

  ‘Why’d he chop his dick off?’

  I thought about it. ‘Maybe he was working out his frustration and his anger on Spane; he probably blamed him for it all going wrong. Or maybe it was more symbolic than that. In a lot of ways, I imagine Smart is like Sam: he’s in denial about who he really is, and when he cut off the penis, he was taking away what made Spane a man.’

  ‘But then he went back to the drawing board.’

  ‘Right. After that, he planned it all out. He was meticulous, patient, determined not to make the same mistakes. He probably spent weeks following the men around after spotting them on the Circle line. He’d initiate conversation by pretending to check their tickets and, from there, I assume he’d start watching them, seeing who they were, their lifestyles, their routes, and then slowly begin to reappear around them. They’d have believed it was all by accident. But he wasn’t bumping into them by accident: he was getting them to warm to him.’