I Am Missing: David Raker Missing Persons #8

by Tim Weaver

  That was when I spotted the air vent.

  It was low down on the wall, about an inch off the floor. One of its screws was loose, almost falling out of its housing, as if it had been repeatedly unscrewed and reattached. There was something else too: fingerprint marks around the fascia plate, like hands had been pressed against the wall in order to lever it off.

  I dropped to my knees in front of it and, using the end of a paperclip from the desk, slowly undid the corner screws. The plate fell away and landed with a clatter. Setting it aside, I got down further, looking into the hole. It was only about six inches high and all I could see at first was a bed of dust and a mesh of silky cobwebs.

  But I quickly realized that wasn’t everything.

  There’s some sort of object in there.

  I grabbed my phone from my pocket, clicked the torch on and placed a hand flat to the floor. Lowering the side of my face almost to the lino, I shone the light inside the air vent. Something immediately reflected back at me.

  A red plastic carrier bag.

  It had been pushed back as far into the vent as it was possible to get, so I had to work to get it out again, not because I couldn’t reach it, but because the air vent was awkward: narrow and close to the ground. Eventually, I managed to snare my fingers on the handle of the bag and, after a couple of failed attempts, dragged it all the way out. As soon as I had it under the light, I saw what was inside.

  A housekeeping uniform.

  On the hems of the trousers there was a white frill of sea salt, crusted and hard; elsewhere, there were specks of dirt, food stains. But the carrier bag didn’t just contain a uniform. When I pulled out the clothing, more things came with it.

  They scattered across the floor around me.

  A credit-card-sized ID, given to the ship’s passengers when the boat was docked somewhere and they wanted to go ashore. It was scratched, the plastic coating peeling away at its corners. There was some US money as well, secured with a blue elastic band. When I snapped it off, I counted two hundred dollars. There were packets of food too: chocolate bars and dried fruit, pots of yoghurt and takeaway sandwiches, their expiry dates now passed. And then there were two photographs, both old. My stomach dropped as I looked at them.

  Because now I knew for sure.

  The bag had belonged to Beth.

  42

  The two photographs lay at my knees like offerings.

  One was of the stepsisters. It was faded, wrinkled, the oldest picture I’d seen of Penny yet. The girls were still young, Penny thirteen or fourteen, Beth a couple of years her junior. They were in a bedroom, had their arms around each other, and were smiling broadly for the camera. I studied the picture, trying to look for clues in it, but there was nothing to find. It was just a lovely picture: happy, warm, genuine.

  I shifted my attention to the other photograph.

  This one was different.

  It was even older, taken – at a guess – in the 1980s. In the centre of the picture was a man in his forties, dressed in a pastel jacket, a T-shirt, denims and a pair of penny loafers. He had an untidy mop of blond hair, a dark moustache, and was smiling, holding up a can of beer to whoever was taking the picture. If I didn’t know the photograph was thirty years old from the outfit, I knew it from the brand of beer – Hofmeister – and in the slow deterioration of the photograph itself: its blanched colours, its grease spots, the fingerprints at its edges, as if it had been handled over and over and over again. There was a pinprick-sized hole in each corner as well, where it had clearly been tacked to a wall.

  There was something familiar about the man, and yet – as I studied him – I felt certain I hadn’t come across him during the case. My gaze lingered on him, the noise of the dryers still rumbling in the room next to me, and then I switched back to the shot of Penny and Beth.

  Everything shifted into focus.

  I swapped between the two pictures, between the man on his own and the girls in the bedroom, and then flipped the photos over to check their reverse.

  There was writing on both.

  A different pen had been used – one blue, one black – but it was the same hand. I recognized the style instantly: the slight slope of the letters, the curve of the s, the lack of a dot on the i. I’d seen it over and over in the notes that Howson had shown me, in the things that had been left behind, hidden in books and taped to the underside of drawers in their home. The handwriting belonged to Penny. These photos had been hers. She must have left them behind after she headed to the UK, and then Beth had taken possession of them.

  On the picture of the sisters, Penny had written, I never meant to hurt us. On the photo of the man, there was no message. There was a name.

  Caleb.

  Instantly, I reverted back to that hotel room with Howson, to when he’d talked about Penny, about her murder, about the reasons she may have been targeted, about all the things of hers he’d managed to find. She’d discovered that Marek had been funnelling money through the Red Tree between 2000 and 2003, she’d got hold of the financial documents to prove it, and she’d written down a name on one of the pages: Caleb.

  But that wasn’t why the man felt familiar to me.

  It wasn’t his name. It wasn’t the connection I’d now made between him and the financial documents that had been stolen from the security suite. It was the fact that he looked exactly like Penny.

  She was his daughter.

  I looked at Caleb Beck, at his daughter, trying to get my thoughts straight, then I looked at the bag Beth had stowed in the air vent. The items had belonged to her, I was sure of that, but the moment I wondered why she’d never come back for them – why they’d been left here, why the food in the bag was past its expiry date – the answer came to me.

  Marek.

  He’d found her.

  I felt nauseous as I remembered the conversation he’d had on the Red Tree IM. He’d said that he’d locate Beth, and that was exactly what he’d done. Wherever it was he tracked her to in the end – whether it was somewhere in the UK, or back in the Empress Islands, at one of the other ports on the Olympia’s route, or here on the boat – he’d got to her.

  He’d got to her like he got to Penny.

  As I glanced at the photo of the two sisters again, I felt something shiver through my blood: rage, and then sorrow, and then the impotence of knowing I couldn’t do a single thing to help them. What made it worse was what was written on the back, the message from Penny to Beth, the confirmation of their argument, the falling-out that Howson had described to me. Had they both gone to their graves like that? I hoped not. The pain of loving and losing someone always faded in time. The pain of regret, of things you never got the chance to make right, didn’t. It stayed on you like a scar.

  I switched my attention back to Caleb Beck again, to the man who’d vanished from Penny’s life when she was barely old enough to talk. As I looked at the picture, as I felt more and more certain that this definitely was Penny’s dad – it was in the eyes, in the slant of the nose, in the jawline – an idea lodged, sour, like blood at the back of my mouth.

  The money.

  If Penny had been correct, if she’d trailed things accurately in the months before she was killed, Caleb Beck was tied to Marek’s money somehow. So had he been the recipient of it back then? Was he still alive somewhere? Nothing about that made sense to me. If he was, if he was knowingly involved with Marek, it meant he surely must have known about Penny’s murder too. I’d worked a lot of cases, both as an investigator and a journalist; I’d seen the terrible things people were capable of, been shaken by them and knocked off balance. But, the truth was, it was rare to see parents murdering their kids in cold blood – and not over money, and not because their child was digging around in their finances.

  The more I thought about it, the more absurd the idea became, the more it started to morph into something malignant: another sleight of hand from Marek, another twisting of the facts, another ruthless act of self-interest. From ther
e, it didn’t feel like much of a stretch to suggest that the money could have been Caleb Beck’s – and Marek was the one who stole it from him.

  ‘You’re not supposed to be in here.’

  I looked up from the items on the floor.

  Someone was back inside the laundry room.

  43

  I turned on my knees and looked out through the door. I couldn’t see very far, just along the row of shelves directly outside.

  ‘I said, you’re not supposed to be in here.’

  I thought someone was talking to me, but there was no one in sight, no evidence I’d been spotted. Even so, I decided it was time to go. I took cameraphone shots of everything I’d pulled out of the bag, put it back as quickly as I could, reset the fascia plate against the wall and clambered to my feet.

  I peered out.

  This time, I could see a woman, olive-skinned and long-haired, right in the centre of the room, her back to me. She was standing at the table, folding bed sheets. I headed left, tracing the circumference of the space, trying to remain behind the walls of towels, duvets and pillowcases stacked on the shelves. At the door, still out of sight of the woman, I pulled at the handle and checked outside.

  It looked clear.

  Slipping through the gap, I exited the laundry room, back into the silence of the corridor, and headed to the lifts, getting the first one up to the lido deck. It was mid-afternoon and, as the forecast that morning had predicted, the weather had begun to change. It was cloudier, marginally cooler, but no one seemed to care. It was still crowded – at the pools, at the bar, at the outdoor restaurant.

  I retreated to the other end, following a half-mile running track that looped around the deck. The throngs of people were hard to avoid, but I found an empty bench at the stern that looked out over the V-shaped wake the ship was carving into the ocean. Everything was so huge, the ship so colossal, that by the time I sat down again it was even more overcast. A wind had picked up too. Surrounded by nothing but endless horizon, I started cycling through the shots I’d taken in the laundry room. The uniform. The money. The expired food. The photographs.

  ‘David Raker?’

  I looked up.

  A bear of a man in his late thirties, shaven-headed and blue-eyed, looked down at me. He was standing a foot away, too close for it to be comfortable.

  I glanced at his name badge.

  Larry Grobb.

  The flag next to his name said he was from the US.

  He was dressed casually in a pair of denims and a golf shirt, but it wasn’t much of a disguise. I could see he was security a mile off. When he realized I wasn’t going to make a run for it, he sat down on the bench beside me. I put my phone away, trying to work out where this was about to go, but then I realized something: Larry Grobb. LG.

  ‘I’m Larry,’ he said. ‘From security.’

  He glanced at me, like he was trying to get a read on me, and then returned to his previous position, staring straight ahead at the stern.

  ‘People tell me you’ve been asking questions. That you’re some sort of detective.’ He was deliberately dialling down his voice. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘I don’t think you need me to answer that, do you?’

  He looked at me sideways; said nothing.

  ‘I mean, Marek has already told you who I am.’

  A flicker of a smile on his face. ‘People on this ship, David, they’re either here to enjoy a vacation, to relax and have a good time, or they work here. And you buzzing around like this, it makes everyone feel jumpy. It makes them think something’s going on when it isn’t. Crew get suspicious when serious-looking men start asking them questions, and the passengers get worried too.’ He shifted on the bench, turning towards me, the slats groaning. ‘That isn’t a great mix.’

  I continued to look at him.

  ‘The silent treatment, huh?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Grobb shot me a humourless smile. ‘She’s dead.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘Beth.’ He shrugged. ‘If that’s who you came looking for, you’re about nine months too late. He took care of her back in January.’

  It was hard to tell whether or not there was regret in his voice. He uncrossed his arms and I saw a tattoo peek out from under the sleeve of his shirt: the bottom half of an American eagle, set inside a triangle, with the word AIRBORNE underneath it.

  Ex-army.

  ‘Here’s what we’re gonna do,’ he said. His expression was as hard as concrete now. ‘We’re gonna stand up, and you’re gonna come with me.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Because you’re either going to do it willingly, with your dignity intact. Or I’m gonna slap some cuffs on you in front of all these people and drag you to the elevators like a dog.’

  He looked out at the crowds and – when I followed his gaze – I could see three other members of the security team, dressed like Grobb, approaching us, all from a different part of the boat. When I looked over my shoulder, there was a fourth, a man even bigger than Grobb, following the path of the running track, his eyes on me.

  ‘So how’s this gonna go, David?’

  Some of the tourists had started to look at us now, drawn away from their conversations by the sight of the security team closing in on me. I tried to think of an escape plan, a way out of this, but I was on a ship in the middle of the ocean, and I was surrounded by five men who would find me eventually, even if I made a run for it.

  ‘Very sensible,’ he said, as if I’d given him his answer, and then clamped a hand around my arm and hauled me to my feet.

  Once I was standing, he let go again.

  ‘Follow me.’

  44

  They took me to a security door on the bottom deck, near the restaurants. It was unmarked, and on the other side was a corridor with plain grey metal walls and three further doors. An office, behind a panel of glass, was at the end.

  The security team who’d trailed Grobb and me all the way down passed us and headed to the office, joining two others. One was eating, the other was flicking through a newspaper. The rest of the desks were empty, except for one at the back where a giant teddy bear was seated at a computer with a sign around its neck that said MANAGER.

  ‘Here,’ Grobb said and, after running his card through a reader on the wall, pushed at the first door on our right. It was an interview room: a couple of chairs, a table moulded to the wall, and a slim CCTV camera on a bracket in the top corner on the far side. There was no view and no windows; at this level, we were beneath the surface of the ocean. ‘Go on in and sit down,’ he said.

  He gave me a sudden shove and, as I stumbled into the room, he slammed the door shut behind me.

  There was no handle on the inside of the door, and nothing on the frame to grab hold of. The room was warm too: if the air conditioning was on, it hadn’t been turned up. I got out my phone and checked for a signal, but it had died about a mile out of Cape Town, so I went to the table and sat down. The longer I sat, the more the panic started to build in me. I got up again and went to the door, knocking on it. It was just a dull thump, nothing more, like a sound that had come a great distance. I did it again, much harder, but no one responded.

  I glanced at the camera on the other side of the room, its gaze fixed on me, a tiny pinprick of red light to the side of the lens. They were watching. They could see me trying the door. They could see everything. As I stared at the camera again, a warning blared behind my eyes – in my bones, in my blood.

  I returned to the table, seating myself, trying to come up with something. I could feel sweat along the arc of my forehead, just below my hairline. I could feel it tracing the ridge of my spine. It wasn’t panic now, it was heat. I’d been wrong about the air conditioning: it hadn’t been turned down, it had been switched off entirely. The room was like an oven.

  ‘David?’

  It was Grobb, his voice muzzled by the door. I jumped to my feet and went across to it, thumping hard w
ith the side of my fist.

  ‘Are you listening to me, David?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’d get comfortable if I was you.’

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘It looks like you’re not coming back in.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  Another protracted silence from the other side of the door. I looked back across my shoulder at the CCTV camera, its unblinking black eye focused on me.

  ‘What’s going on, Grobb?’

  ‘Just sit tight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re gonna be in there for a while.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll find out when the time’s right.’

  45

  Evening became night, and night became morning.

  I checked my watch often to start with, counting minutes, but then – as morning became afternoon, and then afternoon turned to evening again – I stopped doing it as much, and I started to drift. Gradually, I fell into sleep, sitting up in the chair and leaning forward at the table, head resting against my arms.

  I dreamed the same thing as the first night on the boat, of being stuck in a maze lined with doors, and when I woke I’d sweated through my clothes and felt disorientated, dazed, and uncertain of where I was. When I sat up and recovered a little composure, everything quickly moved back into focus.

  After that, I tried to collect my thoughts and come up with a plan, but it was 8 p.m. and I’d been twenty-eight hours without water, and my head was banging hard. I turned in the seat, looked up at the camera and motioned for them to bring me a drink, but I doubted they would run the risk of it. If they opened the door, they gave me a chance – even if it was a small one.

  More hours passed and my headache became worse.

  I tried to close my eyes, tried to sleep it off at the table, but eventually my back hurt from being bent over. Instead, in the early hours of the morning, I got up and walked around, doing circles of the room like a convict released into a prison yard. I counted, trying to give myself something to do, something to zero in on, seeing how many times I could loop the room, but then I started to lose focus again and the numbers fell away, and after a while I just walked the circles in silence. It soon became afternoon again, then evening, then night.