The Vanishing

by John Connor

  Praise for John Connor

  ‘Fast-moving with plenty of exotic locations and tense action, this is a highly entertaining thriller’

  Sunday Mirror

  ‘The action never stops in this exciting thriller about the pathological amorality of the hyper-rich and the heartbreak of their pawns’

  Morning Star

  ‘It’ll be a rare reader able to put A Child’s Game down after a chapter or so’

  Barry Forshaw, The Express

  ‘From the horrifying defenestration in the opening pages to the ultra-violent denouement, Leeds-based barrister John Connor drives his complex tale of secrecy and betrayal along at a cracking pace’

  Irish Independent

  ‘Connor’s plot is enthralling, his characters sharp and vital: Falling is a compelling, intelligent thriller, placing everyday normality in dramatic relief against the horrific experiences of Sharpe and her colleagues’

  Financial Times

  ‘Enjoyably intricate and well-composed’

  Sunday Telegraph

  Dedication

  For Anna, Tom and Sara.

  With thanks to Lovisa.

  The Vanishing

  John Connor

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for John Connor

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  About the Author

  By John Connor

  Copyright

  1

  Ile des Singes Noirs, Seychelles, 1990

  It was over now. From the room beyond the bolted double doors Arisha could hear Liz shrieking and wailing. She turned away in fright, biting her lip and wiping the tears that came to her eyes. She walked shakily through the cool, wood-lined passage with its rattling, antiquated air-conditioning unit, along to the gloomy, intricately carved staircase, then down to the hall and out. Through the open front doors and into the smothering heat. She needed time to think, but on the wide veranda the raw sunlight made her stagger. She leaned on the balustrade and took deep breaths of the insufferable, humid air, heavy with the stench of rotting fruit. There were parrots screeching from the treeline – or was it the monkeys, the filthy black monkeys that gave the place its name? She could still hear the screaming in the room above, so she put her hands over her ears and stared out towards the dock and the shimmering sea – a picture-postcard image of tropical paradise.

  She hated it. She had hated it from the first day they had been forced to come here – it was too hot, too muggy, everything rotting and riddled with mould. The sea looked inviting, but it was full of tiny stinging jellyfish, the beach hid bugs that burrowed into your skin and laid eggs, the jungle was alive with frogs so toxic you would choke just from touching their skin. There was nowhere here that you could be comfortable. She spent the day drenched in sweat, with a permanent headache. But now they would have to leave. The child was dead. This place had killed it.

  When the howling stopped, Liz was going to shout for her, she knew that. She was going to get the blame. It wasn’t her fault, but Liz Wellbeck would need to blame someone else – that was the way it always was with her. Arisha walked carefully down the six, creaking steps on to the compacted red earth of the clearing in front of the house, then kept going, towards the dock, shading her eyes from the sun. She had left her sunglasses by her bed, but her room was right next to the one Liz was in, so she wasn’t going back for them. She had a wide-brimmed straw hat on, but only a tight pair of white shorts, a T-shirt and sandals. She could feel the sun burning her skin as soon as she stepped into it.

  She needed Maxim. She needed him to reassure her. A sob caught in her throat. She had treated the baby as her own, whispered in its ear that it would be safe, that she loved it. A baby girl – a bright, alert, thirteen-month-old. Arisha had fallen for her the moment Maxim had first placed her into her arms. She had held her to her chest and smiled at her and felt her tiny heart beating through their bodies. She had marvelled at the luxurious, thick, jet-black, curly hair – so clean and wonderful that she had pushed her nose into it and smelled it. The little girl’s eyes had been a startling deep blue and she had looked at her with a wide-open, innocent interest that at first, because of what they were doing, had made Arisha want to cry. So trusting, so helpless, so dependent. She hadn’t a clue what was happening to her. Until Arisha had her in her arms and was holding her miniature fingers, looking into her eyes and talking softly, until she had experienced that sudden swelling feeling in her heart as the baby grinned at her and she saw her four, delicate milk teeth – until right then, Arisha had no idea just how much she loved babies, no idea at all.

  The girl could walk a little – a few hesitant steps before she fell back on to all fours. She could mutter or shout a few unintelligible words, things her own mother would have immediately understood, perhaps. But mainly she had been reliant on Arisha to get her to where she wanted to go, to place into her hands the objects that interested her. And Arisha had slipped into the role effortlessly. The journey on the plane had worked so well – Arisha completely focused on the baby’s needs and responses. It seemed like a dream now.

  Children had short memories. Maxim said they could flourish like weeds, adapting, moving on, taking whatever they needed from wherever they could get it, just as he had. And it was true. Arisha had felt a pang of loss – even though it was what they wanted to happen – because the child had warmed to Liz almost immediately. As if able to sense that really Arisha counted for nothing, could guarantee nothing. She was just the delivery girl. It was Liz the baby needed to bond with, Liz who would provide.

  And Liz had been surprisingly affectionate. Elizabeth Wellbeck-Eaton liked to say that she was half Russian, with a Russian mother’s instincts. Her own mother had been an émigrée, something aristocratic and titled, from the Tsarist époque, but that counted for nothing in modern Russia – she spoke Russian, sure, but she understood nothing of what it meant to be from that shithole. The reality was that she was an American, and had lived her entire thirty years in the lap of absolute excess. Despite that, until this moment Arisha had thought there was something emotionally broken in her. In the year she had been working for Liz she had never seen her cry, rarely seen her laugh. Liz was fas
tidious to an extreme, control obsessed, a difficult person to please or work for. In private she spoke derisively of her friends, had a fraught relationship with her father and brother, viewed her husband – Freddie Eaton – with undisguised contempt. She spent over an hour each morning dressing and decorating herself, with the assistance of two or three staff – in the Paris house, at least, not here, because the staff had been left behind when they came here, along with everything else, in order to keep this whole thing secret. Arisha had assumed Liz would be useless with a child, that she wouldn’t have a clue. But she had behaved immediately like the baby really was hers, holding her close, rocking her, talking quietly, taking over everything Arisha had been doing, even the changing. The baby had brought Liz to life. Against all odds, it had worked.

  Arisha had watched with astonishment. And for a while she had really believed that the baby would be safe, that the monstrous thing she and Maxim had done together – stolen a baby – could actually, in the end, have been a good thing. They had given a desperate woman a child, and the child would be happy. After all, her new mother was one of the richest women on the planet. What could go wrong?

  They had been here a week when the symptoms started. Some standard flu the parrots caught and survived each year – that’s what the doctor had said – ‘nothing to worry about’. But it had lingered and got worse, overwhelming the child’s immature immune system, filling her lungs with bright green, infected mucus. Today she had gone from a cough and a runny nose to blue lips and breathing difficulties in less than four hours. They had sent someone in the seaplane to get the doctor again, but it was a three-and-a-half-hour flight to the big island, and now it was too late.

  The place was only fit for the monkeys, the precious, stinking monkeys Liz was in love with, trying to save them from extinction or whatever – her little pet project, prior to the baby. That would change now, Arisha guessed. Liz could shift loyalties as she could change clothing. Everything Arisha had been taught as a child was true, even the crude communist slogans – rich people were degenerate, self-serving, immoral, they had no allegiance to anything but themselves.

  As she reached the slope down to the dock she saw with relief that Maxim was already running towards her, coming from the boat. He too had a pair of shorts on, though longer than her own and baggy with pockets, no doubt stuffed with ammunition and cigarettes. His legs, chest, head and feet were bare – but he had tanned within days of getting here. No matter how careful she was, that didn’t happen to her skin. She was too pale, too freckly, her hair naturally a light red. It had been long, beautiful – almost down to her waist – but she had cut it and dyed it an ugly brown the day they got to Paris with the baby, because Maxim had told her to, because that was part of his plan – so that now it wasn’t even long enough to shade her neck from the sun. His blond hair – growing longer now he was out of the military – had bleached almost white, because he swam and stood in the sun every day, despite the jellyfish and bugs and the danger of heatstroke. He was loving every minute of this place. He thought it was paradise.

  She started to run towards him and had a fleeting fantasy that they would both just turn around, get in the boat and sail away from it all. He stopped when he saw her and shouted something, but she couldn’t hear for the birds and monkeys. The parrots were very near her, off to her right. She could hear their wings thrashing the air as they took off in alarm. Maxim glanced at them, distracted. ‘What’s happening?’ he yelled, and she heard this time. He had the gun in his hands. While they were here he was in charge of security for the Wellbeck-Eatons, which meant he was never without some gun or other. There was a constant danger of kidnap, he said. She waved her arms at him, slowed down, then suddenly started to really cry. As she got to him he grabbed her by the shoulder with one hand, his face intense with concentration and worry. ‘What’s happened, Arisha? Tell me what’s going on.’ He spoke Russian with her, as they always did when alone. She leaned her head against his chest, smelling his sweat, feeling it damp against her cheek, catching her breath and telling him at the same time, ‘The baby died … I think the baby died …’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ She could feel him tightening up. ‘Are you sure?’

  She could hear the fear in his voice. She wanted him to put his arms around her, to hug her, but he was on edge now.

  ‘I thought it might be someone attacking Liz,’ he muttered. ‘She’s screaming like an animal …’

  ‘The little girl, Max … the little girl …’

  He pulled her into him now, ran a hand across her hair. ‘We have to be calm,’ he said, trying to control his voice, to be gentle with her. ‘It’s a terrible thing. But it wasn’t your fault. If we had a child we would never bring her to a place like this. That was her decision. Not ours. If it had been her own natural child she would never have brought it to this place. She’s not fit to have children. She’s a fucking idiot …’

  ‘The child hurt nobody … she was only thirteen months old …’

  He tilted her head up, so that she was looking at him. ‘The child is safe,’ he said quietly. ‘Wherever she is now, she’s safe. No more pain.’ He frowned at her. ‘We have to think of us now, not the child. We have to be very careful. Remember where we are, remember what we’ve done. Don’t think about the child. You need to get back up there and be there for her. She’s shouting for you.’

  ‘I can’t stand this, Max. I can’t take any more of it …’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. You want to go back to Russia? You want that life again?’ He lifted her chin so that she was looking into his eyes. He was twenty-one, a year older than her, but over a foot taller, with a lean body, stripped of fat during his recent spell in Afghanistan. He was about to say something else, maybe something kinder, but then something caught his attention from behind her. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘She’s coming down here …’

  Arisha turned and looked. Liz Wellbeck was on the path, stumbling towards them, weeping uncontrollably, shouting Arisha’s name. She was in a shabby, soiled dressing gown, her hair matted and stuck across her face, her eyes black pools of smudged mascara that had run down her cheeks like clown paint. There was something in her arms, a bundle.

  ‘She’s got the little girl with her,’ Maxim hissed. ‘Are you sure she’s dead? Are you sure?’

  She wasn’t sure of anything, but she couldn’t do anything but go to her now. They both began to run back up the path, pretending they had only just realised what was happening. As they reached Liz she fell forward so that Maxim had to catch her by the arms and brace her against himself. Arisha gasped. Liz was holding the baby in a silk blanket. She could see its tiny white hands, the curly black hair, the little closed eyes, the skin grey and loose, all its features fixed and wax-like – as if it were a bizarre, macabre doll, a replica of a dead baby. It didn’t look like the child she remembered from the plane journey. She started to tremble, holding her hands to her mouth.

  ‘Get off me!’ Liz spat at Maxim. ‘Get your hands off me.’ She pushed herself away. She was on one knee, shielding the bundle from him. ‘You did this,’ she hissed, in Russian. ‘You killed her …’ Her eyes were fierce, but they quickly dimmed as she collapsed on to the path. She started to rock the dead baby, the tears streaming from her eyes, her mouth twisted in an awful grimace of anguish. ‘My baby’s dead,’ she screamed. ‘My little baby is dead …’

  2

  London, Saturday, 14 April 2012

  Even from fifty feet back in the queue, Tom Lomax could see that the security presence was unusual. There were at least six guys on the gate and they weren’t doing anything but looking at the people going through. They were all wearing sunglasses and smart, dark suits, standing like people who were carrying guns, hands hanging loose and ready, jackets open. He smiled to himself. It was part of the circus, he assumed – the celebrity spectacular that had brought them all here.

  He was holding his son’s hand, waiting to get into the place which presently served as the footb
all ground for Hatton FC, a struggling county league club that probably gated about five hundred supporters on a good day. As far as he could see, the ground consisted of a row of scrappy fields bordering the south-eastern tip of Heathrow Airport. The planes came over low and loud every fifty seconds. But today would be a bumper day for the club. Over a wire fence to his right he could see a couple of thousand people already inside, groups of kids running around while they waited for the event to get under way.

  It was too warm for the leather jacket he was wearing. ‘You can take your fleece off,’ he said to Jamie. ‘I’ll hang on to it for you.’ But right then a jumbo came in, drowning everything. Jamie, seven years old, put his hands over his ears. From where Tom was standing there was a row of houses blocking his view of the south runway, but from the height of the jet it couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards away.

  He checked his watch again. Almost one o’clock. He had to have Jamie back with his mother by three. Half-term was just ending, but Sally had got Jamie an extra week and booked a holiday in Spain for them in the only week she could get off from work. She and Jamie were flying out at six that evening. But Alex – Tom’s closest friend – had told Jamie about this ‘unmissable’ event, and so here they were, rushing to fit it in. Both Alex and his son – Garth – were meant to be with them, but Garth had pulled a muscle in his ankle the evening before and couldn’t walk, so now Tom and Jamie were going alone.

  They were here not to watch Hatton play, but because a premiership striker was doing an appearance, proceeds to some charity. Someone called Dimitri Barsukov had apparently set up and paid for the striker’s visit, because Barsukov had some connection to the club, either owned it, or wanted to own it – most likely in order to buy the land from under them, according to Alex (and Alex would know about such things). Hence the muscle – to protect the celeb striker. Or so Tom imagined until he heard them speak. As he went past them, through the gates and into the ground – begrudgingly handing over his twenty on the way – he noticed they were speaking some Eastern Bloc language – possibly Russian – which meant they were probably here for Barsukov, not for the striker – the striker was from Merseyside. Tom’s hand went to the stiff envelope in his inside jacket pocket and his mind turned over the little sequence of events that had brought him here. He began to worry.