by Tim Weaver
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just don’t remember.’
He sounded dispirited, beaten down, even more so than usual. It was getting harder to know what to say to him, and not only because his history was so limited. I knew for sure now that there were things orbiting his life that were off kilter, secrets about Marek that were buried in the spaces that Richard had once existed in. But that was the problem. There was no clarity on where anyone or anything fitted into Richard’s life, because there was no clarity on his past at all.
‘You remember, back at the hotel, I asked you if you’d ever come across a guy called Alexander Marek?’ I said to him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I think so.’
I spelled the surname out for him, and then described Marek to him, his physical appearance, trying desperately to jog something in the blackness of his memory. ‘That name or description definitely doesn’t sound familiar to you?’
‘Marek,’ Richard responded. ‘Do you know where he might be from?’
I hadn’t mentioned that Marek might be foreign. His accent was so slight, it was hard to even pick up on, and I’d become more interested in what he was doing with Naomi Russum. But now I realized my mistake. Richard was smart. I should have used that.
‘I think he might be Czech,’ I said. ‘He’s got a faint accent.’
‘Oh, right,’ he replied. ‘Okay.’
It was a slightly odd response.
‘Richard?’
‘Sorry. I mean, I know I don’t recognize his name,’ he said, his voice laced with a familiar mix of confusion and frustration, ‘but the physical description, the thing about him having an accent, it reminds me of this …’
‘This what?’ I asked.
‘Maybe it’s nothing,’ he said, ‘but there was this guy.’
‘What guy?’
‘I don’t know if it’s even …’ His voice trailed off again. I tried not to hurry him, even though I wanted to.
‘Richard?’
‘Yes. Sorry.’
‘What was it you were going to tell me?’
‘It’s probably nothing,’ he said, ‘but … I don’t know, I’ve just remembered this guy who came to talk to me at the caravan at the start of the year.’
I stopped. ‘What guy?’
‘It was back in February time, I think.’
‘Who was the guy, Richard?’
‘He said he was an investigator.’
‘A cop?’
‘He didn’t say “cop”. Just investigator.’
I could feel myself tense. The phone suddenly started humming in my hand. I had another call waiting.
‘Just give me a sec,’ I said to Richard, and then checked the number.
It was blocked.
It could have been Ewan Tasker. He generally called from a secure line. Or it could have been one of my other sources, retained from my newspaper days, who needed to stay anonymous for obvious reasons. But it wasn’t any of them. Deep down, I knew exactly who it was.
‘Just hold the line a second, Richard.’
I switched to the blocked number. Even before I’d said anything, before I’d really had the chance to, a voice said, ‘I know where you are.’
Marek.
‘I know you’re at Heathrow,’ he said, and in the background of the call I could hear voices, conversation, vehicles, bland music. Was he at the hotel where I dumped his laptop? ‘I know you’re still here somewhere.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘I’m right, aren’t I? You’re still here.’
I looked out to the hotel foyer, at the faces that surrounded me, paranoid now that he’d already figured me out; that this was some game he was playing.
That he was here, watching me.
‘Are you trying to find a flight out of here?’ he said.
I moved from face to face, looking for his.
‘It doesn’t matter if you do or you don’t.’
I couldn’t see him.
‘It doesn’t matter, because I’ll find you. And when I find you, I’ll rip –’
I hung up on him.
35
I told Richard I would call him back, dumped everything into the holdall and headed out to my car. Marek had had enough time to geolocate his MacBook to the airport, so if he was in the area it was too much of a risk to stay put. I headed back into London, towards Chiswick. Fifteen minutes later, I was seated at the back of a Starbucks on the high street, my back to the wall and in full view of the door, with Richard on the line again.
‘This investigator who came to see you,’ I said, ‘what did he want?’
‘He was looking for a missing woman.’
‘A missing woman? Who was she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you remember this guy having an accent?’
‘Yes,’ Richard said. ‘It was very soft, but I could still hear it.’
Marek. It had to be him.
‘Why didn’t you mention this to me before?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. It never made sense until now.’ He paused, seemed to be struggling to articulate his thoughts. ‘I know how that sounds, but it’s like it was there the whole time, flickering away in the background – I just couldn’t remember it until you mentioned the way he looked, and his accent.’
I thought of Naomi Russum, of how she’d used hypnosis on him. Was this her doing? Had she been trying to suppress his recollection of meeting Marek?
What else had she erased?
‘Did the guy show you a picture of this missing woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘Had you ever seen her before?’
‘No, never.’
‘What about in the time since?’
‘No.’
So the woman definitely wasn’t Penny Beck.
I pushed on. ‘You said he came to see you in February?’
‘Yes.’
‘Pretty soon after you were found?’
‘Right.’
I made a note of it. ‘What did he say his name was?’
‘Uh, Jones, I think.’
‘Which struck you as odd?’
‘Yes, because of the accent.’
I tried to think. What was Marek doing? Who was the missing woman he was looking for? If he was trying to discover whether Richard knew anything about her, whether there was a chance that he remembered the woman at all, why not wait to funnel those questions via Russum’s therapy sessions? Soon after Marek had been to see Richard at the caravan park, Russum had started the sessions; pretty soon after that, they’d begun building a rapport. So why wouldn’t Marek just wait and tell her to raise questions about the missing woman, in the same way she’d been testing Richard’s recollection of Penny Beck? There had to be a reason that Marek chose not to wait a few weeks to use Russum, and I could only think of one: that something would look suspicious, even to a man with no memory, if Russum asked him about this missing woman.
‘Did he say anything else about her?’ I asked.
‘He said they were concerned for her safety.’
Which was probably a lie.
‘Did he say how long she’d been missing?’
‘No.’
‘What about her name?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘Okay. Give me a second.’
I returned to the IM transcripts, trying to see if anything in there matched what Richard was telling me.
There was one passage.
It was with someone whose username was LG and who had no bio on the intranet. So it wasn’t a school employee. Whoever it was must have been set up on the system and given access codes by Marek. I tried doing a Google search for the IP address listed beneath the user in the logs, but just hit a series of dead ends.
I returned to the transcript.
AMarek Nothing.
LG He doesn’t recognize her?
AMarek No.
LG Could he be faking?
AMarek I doubt it. He has no
memory. Have there been any more sightings of her?
LG We’re still looking. We know she was here with him w/c 10 Jan and we’ve also got witnesses who reckon they might have seen her in the time since.
AMarek Okay.
LG So do you want me to handle it or are you coming back to the O?
AMarek I’m coming back. We’ll find her.
Three things leaped out.
The woman wasn’t being looked for, she was being hunted; she and Richard were seen together in the week before he turned up in Hampshire; and Marek had gone to somewhere called the O in an effort to find the woman.
What the hell was the O?
I returned to the documents and JPEGs I’d lifted from Marek’s MacBook. I looked for anything I had missed that could hint at who the woman was, and why Marek came to Richard to ask him about her. I switched to a different view, so files scrolled right to left as icons, making it easier to see what each document was, what file type, and what it might contain.
‘Richard?’
‘Yeah, I’m still here.’
‘Can you remember anything else this investigator said?’
I continued to tab through the files on the laptop.
‘He didn’t tell me how long she’d been missing,’ he said, ‘or, at least, I don’t remember if he did. But he believed she was still in the area.’
I tried to interpret that: if Marek could place Richard with the woman, and if – as was claimed in the IM conversation with LG – they were seen together in the days before he turned up at the edge of Southampton Water, then it sounded like it was some sort of test. Marek was assessing him. He was first looking for signs the amnesia was a lie, and when he realized it wasn’t, he was then looking for other lies that Richard might be telling. He was trying to get a read on Richard, trying to see if the woman had returned to find him in the days after he turned up; to see if she explained who she was, talked to him, reassured him, told him he could trust her. Basically, Marek was looking for signs that Richard was protecting her. But Richard wasn’t lying about his amnesia, and he wasn’t lying about knowing the woman. Whoever she was to him, he didn’t remember her any more, and she hadn’t sought him out after he was found with no memory of who he was. Marek would have quickly realized that.
‘He showed you a picture of her, right?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Can you describe the picture to me?’
‘Uh … I think it was taken from a CCTV camera.’
‘It was from a surveillance camera?’
‘Yes.’
That had to be the reason. That was why Marek chose not to wait for Russum to talk to Richard about the woman in her sessions. Even in his confused state, he’d have instinctively started asking difficult questions if Russum began showing him CCTV stills of a woman. But if Marek turned up at his caravan, posing as an investigator, it looked far less suspicious.
They’d misjudged Richard, though.
The woman in the picture, the slight twang of Marek’s accent, the fact that the photograph was taken from a security camera; Marek had thought those details would vanish over time, just another glut of information that Russum would help to remove and that would quickly become lost in Richard’s search for answers. But he hadn’t forgotten.
‘Where did the camera seem to be?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘On a street? Inside a building?’
‘Inside a building, I think.’
‘A shop? An office?’
He paused for a moment. ‘It looked like a hotel.’
‘A hotel foyer?’
‘No. It was more like a corridor.’
‘There were rooms on both sides?’
‘Yes.’
I rubbed a hand against my forehead. A hotel corridor.
But which hotel?
‘Do you remember anything else about it?’ I asked.
I heard him take a long breath and, in the silence that followed, I began to tab through the files again, slowly. Word documents. PDFs. JPEGs of timesheets and invoices. After a while, they all began blurring into one.
‘No,’ Richard said finally. ‘That’s all I’ve got.’
‘I need you to be sure.’
‘I’m pretty sure.’
I tried again. ‘Just think really hard about it for a sec–’
But then I stopped.
Another JPEG had appeared in the file viewer.
‘David?’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said.
I double-clicked on the JPEG, opening it up, and as it loaded I dragged the laptop closer to me. I’d seen the picture before, the first time I’d gone through the MacBook, but it hadn’t seemed important then. Marek had hundreds of JPEGs on his hard drive, a lot of them taken from cameras inside the Red Tree; angled shots of rooms that were hard to get a sense of. I’d assumed they were test shots, stills taken from a newly installed security system to make sure it was working.
And maybe they were.
But this one wasn’t.
It was a shot of a corridor with doors on either side, just as Richard Kite had described. A patterned carpet. Paintings on the walls. At the very top of the shot, almost out of view, a woman was walking away from the lens, looking over her shoulder, as if worried she was being followed. She was blonde, dressed in black, and had a dark backpack over her shoulders.
‘David?’ Richard said again.
‘Yeah, I’m here. I think I might’ve found her.’
‘The woman?’
‘Yeah. I’m going to message a picture to your phone.’
I took a shot of the screen and sent it across to him. Thirty seconds later, I heard a soft beep in the background of the call as the picture arrived.
‘That’s it,’ he said.
‘That’s the picture he showed you?’
‘Yes.’
I zoomed in on the woman’s face.
The closer I got, the more pixelated it became, so I backed out again and tried to get a sense of the rest of it. Doors. Decor. The way she was looking over her shoulder. Something was odd about the shot but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
What aren’t I seeing?
‘Who do you think she is?’ Richard asked.
I studied the woman again.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, but then – for the first time – I switched my attention to the filename of the picture, and it was like the ground shifted beneath my feet.
I looked up, away from the screen, recalling something that Jacob Howson had told me: Penny was born an only child, but she’d had a stepsister. I looked at the woman in the picture again, and then at the name of the file.
The file was called ‘Beth’.
36
Beth. Penny Beck’s stepsister.
I tried to make connections, tried to think about the reasons they had fallen out, whether it was relevant to Richard Kite or to how the two sisters had known him. I tried to think why – over fourteen months after the murder of her sister, and a week before Richard lost his memory – Beth was seen with him in a hotel. What were they doing in that hotel? Where had Beth gone afterwards? Had Marek eventually tracked her down?
I ended the call and then did a quick search for women with the name Beth, Bethan or Bethany who had been reported missing. I couldn’t find anything. Instead, I got a mix of women on social media accounts, LinkedIn profiles and YouTube videos who clearly weren’t her. I went through them just in case, didn’t find anything, and spent a moment trying to imagine what her invisibility might mean. That she was alive? That she had fled Marek? Or that she was dead and, like Penny’s, her death had been disguised?
I returned my attention to the photograph.
She must have been in her late twenties, although it was hard to be sure due to the quality of the CCTV footage. The colour was rinsed out: reds were pale pinks, blacks were grey, white was cream. There was still something about the construction of the shot that bugged me, some aspect of it, but I
couldn’t decide what it was.
Doors were visible on either side of the corridor, odds on the left, evens on the right, and each one had a set of brass numbers: eighty through to ninety-two on one side, and seventy-nine to ninety-three on the other. Beth was in the top left of the frame, only a few feet from the door marked eighty, but she didn’t look like she’d come out of it or was about to go in; she looked like she was passing by it, making her way along the corridor. The way she was glancing over her shoulder, her expression, even the way she was dressed, in black with a rucksack, seemed to play into the idea of someone lying low; someone who’d come to do a job, to carry out a task.
According to the timecode information in one of the bottom corners, the shot was taken at 2.09 in the morning on Friday 15 January. That was five days before Richard was found in Hampshire. If, as Marek seemed to be suggesting in his IM conversation with LG, Beth and Richard were seen together in the week commencing 10 January, that meant they may have been in and around the hotel for as long as five days, maybe even over a week, before Richard turned up on the edge of the river. So what were they were doing together? And where was the hotel?
Based on Marek’s message, I did a search for hotels called ‘the O’ and only found one, in Vancouver. Somehow it seemed unlikely that it was the hotel in the photograph of Beth. In that, the paintings on the wall appeared to be famous British landmarks; although it was harder to make them out the further down the corridor you went, in the frames closest to the camera I could see the London Eye, in silhouette, and what looked like the Houses of Parliament on the opposite wall.
Did that mean the hotel was in London?
I went back to the web and searched for city hotels beginning with O, but there were too many results. Apart from the paintings, there was nothing else in the shot that might give away the location of the building. I zoomed in a little and began scrolling from painting to painting, and then from door to door, hoping there might be a logo somewhere, a hint as to which hotel chain this was, but the only thing I could find was what looked like some sort of flower icon above the locks. It was hard to be entirely sure, though, and the longer I stared, the more I started to think that it might not be a flower at all.