by Tom Weaver
'Yes. And the fifteen other students who were in there with her.'
'How long's the walk between classrooms?'
'No walk at all. They're in the same block. Chemistry's on the top floor, Physics on the second and Biology on the ground.'
'There's no CCTV in that part of the school, right?'
'Sadly not. We have cameras, but we can't afford to have them in every building — not on the budget we're handed.' He turned in his chair and pointed to a diagram on the wall. It was a plan of the school campus with tiny CCTV icons scattered across it. 'Those are the cameras we have. One at the entrance, one on the car park, one at reception, one outside the English and Maths block, and one trained on the playing fields.'
'Why only English and Maths?'
'It's the block furthest away from here.'
'Are there multiple entrances to the school?'
'Not really. Well, not official entrances, anyway. Some of the students live in the estates beyond the football pitches, so they climb over the fence and come across the fields. There's a rear car park behind the Sixth Form block as well, where some of the students in Years 11 and 12 park their cars, if they're lucky enough to have them. That's fenced off too, but only to about waist height.'
'So if she was going to leave the school grounds, and not be caught on CCTV, her best bet would have been jumping the fence at the back of the Sixth Form car park?'
'Correct. I think that's what the police concluded too.'
I reached down and got out Megan's Book of Life. 'Would it be possible to speak to a couple of students?'
'Megan's friends?'
'Yes.' I looked down at the pad. 'Lindsey Watson and Kaitlin Devonish?'
He nodded, picked up the phone and punched in a four-digit number. On the other side of the door, I heard a phone ring in reception. 'Linda, I need Lindsey Watson and Kaitlin Devonish sent around as soon as possible, please.' He put the phone down. 'Anyone else?'
I looked down at the pad, turned it around and slid it across the desk to him. The six people at the bottom,' I said, pointing to the boys' names. 'Are any of them students here?'
He removed a pair of glasses from the top pocket of his jacket and popped them on, studying the names for a moment. Yes.'
'All of them?'
'I recognize all of them but one.'
'Who's the odd one out?'
'Anthony "A. J." Grant.'
'You don't recognize that name?'
'No,' he replied, taking off his glasses. He got up and went to a filing cabinet at the back of the room. It had three drawers, each filled with the same Manila folders, each folder tabbed. Presumably he liked doing things the old-fashioned way. He went to G, but didn't find anything.
'He's definitely not a student here.'
'Every student in the school is in there?'
'Every current student, yes.'
I brought the pad back across towards me and put a question mark next to A. J. Grant. The other names on here —' I pushed it back towards him '— are they all in the same year as Megan?'
'Yes.'
'Is it going to be possible to speak to them?'
'Certainly — but only Lindsey and Kaitlin today. Four of them are on a field trip to Normandy. The other… Well, the truth is, I don't know where Charles Bryant is. He missed a lot of school last year because his mother died. This week is the one-year anniversary of her passing, and he hasn't been in at all. I've tried calling his father, but have had no response. I even sent one of the teachers round to his house, but no one was home. I've no idea where he is, and to be honest, I think this week he's best left alone.'
'Would it be possible to get an address for him?'
'I can't give out addresses, I'm afraid.'
There was a knock at the door. Bothwick looked up.
'Come in.'
Two girls entered. They shuffled forward, their eyes flitting between the both of us. One was beautiful: petite with a dusting of make-up, slim and womanly. The other was plainer, bigger, dressed more conservatively, but smiling.
'Kaitlin, Lindsey, this is Mr Raker. He's looking into Megan's disappearance for her mum and dad.'
I stood. 'David.'
'Lindsey,' the bigger girl beamed.
The other girl hesitated.
'Kaitlin,' she said quietly. She had an accent.
I turned to Bothwick. 'Is it okay if I take them somewhere?'
He looked completely taken aback, as if I'd threatened to burn down the school. What do you mean?'
'I mean, is it okay if I take the girls for a coffee?'
'Why?'
'I'd just like to speak to them in private.' He eyed me suspiciously. 'I'd prefer them to stay on school premises.'
'Fine. So is there somewhere we can go where we won't get interrupted?'
'You could go to the canteen.' 'There won't be any kids in there?' 'We've already had lunch.' I looked at my watch. Two-thirty. 'Okay, we'll go there.'
Chapter Four
The canteen was long and narrow, the floor tiled in old hardwood, the ceilings high and sculptured in white plaster. Along one side were four huge windows. Light poured in, even as rain started spattering against the glass. Opposite was the kitchen, with big women in white uniforms cleaning out huge vats full of half-finished food.
On the walk over, Lindsey had done all the talking. The last time she'd seen Megan was before the Carvers went to Florida.
'She seemed fine,' she said, turning to her friend. 'Didn't she, Kay?'
Kaitlin glanced at me, then at her friend, and nodded.
'So how come you didn't see her between the time she got back and the time she disappeared?' I asked Lindsey.
'I was on a student exchange in Italy.'
'What about you, Kaitlin?'
Kaitlin glanced briefly at me. She looked nervous, like she might be in trouble. The police had probably been to her home, asking questions and trying to work the angles. Sometimes that had the opposite effect. You ended up pushing harder because you felt like they were closing up, but they were only closing up because they felt like they weren't helping. Maybe, in some way, Kaitlin felt responsible. If she'd met Megan outside the penultimate class of the day, instead of by the lockers, she might never have vanished. Instead she said goodbye to her friend after lunch and never saw her again.
'Can you tell me what happened?' I asked her, after we were all seated.
'I told the police.'
'I know you did. I know you helped them out a lot. I'm just trying to see if there are any small things that they might have missed. You're not in trouble. I'm just here to help Megan's parents and find out what happened to her.'
She nodded but still seemed nervous. Her hands were flat to her legs, one of them rubbing the top of her thigh gently.
'Where are you from, by the way?'
She looked at me, frowned. 'Tufnell Park.'
'No. I mean, originally.'
She was still frowning. 'South Africa.'
'I thought so. Nice part of the world. I used to live in South Africa.'
For the first rime something shifted in her expression: the hardness, the stillness, replaced by a slight softening of the muscles. 'What part?' she asked.
'Johannesburg'
She nodded, but her face hardly moved this time, as if she wasn't actually listening to me. I studied her for a moment, the look in her face, her hand moving against her leg, and for the first time wondered if it was shyness preventing her from opening up or something else.
'Kaitlin?'
She turned and faced me.
'Can you go over what happened?'
'I spent lunchtime with Meg,' she said quietly. 'Then, first period, I had History, and she had Physics. Between periods, we were meant to meet at the lockers in the Science block, but I waited there and she didn't turn up.'
'Why meet at the lockers?'
She frowned, looked at Lindsey. We always did that.'
'Before Biology?'
'Y
es. Unless we had a free period together before. If we had a free period, Linds, Meg and me would probably go to the library or the Sixth Form block.'
'Did Megan seem all right that day?'
'Fine.'
'She didn't seem off colour or worried about anything?'
'No.'
'Just like her normal self?'
'Pretty much.'
I paused. 'Pretty much?'
Kaitlin shrugged. 'Like I told the police, she said she'd had a headache for a couple of days. Nothing major. Just kind of a fuzzy head.'
I wrote that down, and then we started talking about Megan generally — what she was like, her personality, how she'd scored straight As in her GCSEs. Lindsey did all of the talking. It didn't amount to much. Most of it dovetailed with what the Carvers had already told me: serious about school, serious about making a career for herself, serious about not letting anything get in the way. Basically the most unlikely runaway you could get.
'Did Megan get on all right with the teachers here?'
'Who gets on with teachers?' Lindsey said.
'She wasn't close to one of them in particular?'
Lindsey frowned.
'I'm looking for reasons why she might have disappeared.'
Her mouth formed an O, as if she suddenly got the line of questioning, then she shook her head. 'I don't think so. In science, a lot of the teachers are women anyway.'
I nodded. 'Her dad said she used to work in a video store…'
'Yeah,' Lindsey replied. 'She did two weekends a month. But I think that place closed down about three months ago.'
'Okay. But did she ever meet anyone while she was there?'
'I don't think so.' She paused, looked at Kaitlin, got no help and turned to me again. 'No one apart from Charlie - but she already knew him.'
'Who's Charlie?'
'Charlie Bryant.'
'Charles Bryant?'
Lindsey nodded again.
'The kid whose mum died?'
'Yeah.'
'Were the two of them friendly?'
'They went out for a while.'
'For how long?'
'I don't know… couple of months.'
'When was this?'
'After his mum died.'
'A year ago?'
Yeah. He was hard work, though.' She paused, as if she might have just realized why. 'I mean, he'd just lost his mum. You can understand that.' 'Is that why they split up?'
'Megan said she felt sorry for him, but she didn't really fancy him. After a couple of months, she called it off.'
'How did he take it?'
'He was upset. He really, really liked her. But he seemed to be okay.'
'Was he still working in the video store when Megan disappeared?'
'I think so.'
'So they still spoke?'
'Yeah.'
'And got on pretty well?'
'Yeah, I'd say so…' Lindsey glanced at Kaitlin. Wouldn't you, Kay?'
Kaitlin looked at me and nodded. I underlined Charles Bryant's name. 'Does the name A. J. Grant mean anything to either of you?' The blank expressions told me everything I needed to know. I changed tack. 'Did you have any favourite pubs or clubs you used to go to?'
'Tiko's,' Lindsey said immediately.
'That's a club?'
'Yeah. In the West End.'
I made a note of it. 'Any others?'
They looked at each other. 'Not really,' Lindsey continued. 'I mean, we go to lots of places, but Tiko's is the place with the best music.'
I took out Megan's digital camera and scrolled through to the picture of her standing in front of the block of flats. 'Did either of you take this?'
They studied it, Lindsey holding the camera.
'Where is she?'
I shrugged. 'I don't know. You don't recognize it?'
'No,' Lindsey said, shaking her head.
'Kaitlin?'
'No,' she said.
I nodded, took the camera back and briefly glanced at Kaitlin. Her eyes had left mine, and she'd gone cold again. Shut down.
Something was definitely up.
Bothwick wasn't there when I got back. I glanced at the reception where one of the secretaries was taking a phone call, and then quickly moved inside his office, pushing the door shut behind me. I didn't have much time.
Two files were perched on the edge of the desk, where he'd left them. Kaitlin and Lindsey. I left Lindsey's where it was and picked up Kaitlin's. A school photograph of her, probably a couple of years younger. Below that, a list of the subjects she was taking and an attendance record. At a quick glance, it looked pretty good. No long absences, no comments in the spaces provided. On the next page was her home address in Tufnell Park, and on the final one her last school report. At the bottom: A for Drama.
So she definitely wasn't shy.
I snapped the file closed, placed it back on the desk and opened up the top drawer of the filing cabinet. The Bryant file was about eight in. Inside was a photo of him. He was a handsome kid; dark hair, bright eyes. Underneath was a top sheet with his address on. He lived with his father near Highgate Wood.
Then, outside, I could hear footsteps.
Bothwick.
I closed the file, dropped it back into the cabinet drawer and closed it as quietly as I could. A second later, he appeared in the doorway. Ah!' he said. 'Sorry about that.'
'No problem.'
'Did you get everything you needed?'
I smiled, briefly eyeing the files again to see they were definitely where he'd left them. Then I shook his hand and told him I did.
Lindsey was right: the video store Megan used to work in was shut. Not just shut for the day. Shut for good. I drove past it and headed along Holloway Road to the Bryant home in Highgate, a three-storey townhouse with a double garage and a wrought-iron porch.
There wasn't a single light on anywhere inside.
I rang the doorbell and waited. Nothing. No movement. No sound from inside. As rain started to fall, spitting at first, then coming harder, I stepped down from the porch and wandered around to the side. A path led parallel to the property, behind a locked gate. I could see a sliver of garden but not much else. Walking back to the front door, I rang the doorbell again — but when no one answered for a second time, I headed back to the car in the rain.
Chapter Five
Three weeks after Christmas, a leaflet got posted through my door. It was advertising a support group for widows and widowers under forty-five. I wasn't a great believer in fate. In fact, I hardly believed in it at all. But I understood why people might when that leaflet landed on my doormat. At the time I was fresh off a case that had almost killed me, and I'd spent Christmas alone watching old home movies of Derryn. Physically and emotionally, I was low. So in the second week of January, I decided, on the spur of the moment, to go along, not expecting it to make much of a difference. Nine months later, it was still part of my weekly routine.
Most Tuesdays we met in a community college in Acton, in a room that smelt of stale coffee. But once a month, we all chipped in and went for a meal somewhere. If I hadn't already agreed to go, I might have cancelled it to concentrate on the Carver case, but it was too late to back out now. Instead, I headed from the Bryant house to my office in Ealing, picked up a change of clothes and some deodorant, and then drove to the restaurant. It was a Thai place in Kew, close to the river.
Something sizzled in the kitchen as I entered, the smell of coconut and soy sauce filling the air. There were fourteen of them sitting at a big table by one of the windows. The woman who ran the group was a short, dumpy 32-year-old called Jenny. Her husband had suffered a heart attack running for a train at King's Cross. She saw me, came over and pecked me on the cheek. I'd liked Jenny pretty much from the first time I'd talked to her. She was lively, quick-witted and fun, but she had an understanding of people; an ability to read and connect with them. We walked to the table together, and I apologized to everyone for being late, shaking hands and saying h
ellos to some of the regulars. There were two spaces left: one was in the middle next to an accountant called Roger, who, after a couple of glasses of red wine, always started talking about the brake horsepower of his Mazda RX-8; the other was right at the end, next to two faces I hadn't seen before.
'David, we've got a couple of new arrivals tonight,' Jenny said. She leaned in to me as we walked towards them. 'I was hoping you could keep them entertained for me.'
Jenny introduced them as Aron Crane and Jill White. They'd both lost their partners, and had got to know each other by sharing a morning coffee-shop routine. I wondered whether they'd since got together, but they sat apart from one another at the table, and — as we got talking — reminisced about their partners in a way that made it obvious they weren't a couple.
We ordered, and spent the next half an hour drifting through polite conversation: the weather, the traffic, a local MP who had been caught with a rent boy and his trousers round his ankles in a toilet in Bayswater. Both of them seemed pleasant enough. She was closer to my age, maybe just the wrong side of forty, and had deep blue eyes — how you imagined the sea would look in places you couldn't afford to go — slight imperfections in her skin, like acne scars, and a small mark just above the bump of her chin. Both she was acutely aware of. When she talked, her hands automatically went to her face, the fingers of one hand resting against the curve of her jaw, the other tucking her blonde hair behind her ears. It was an appealing quality: a kind of underlying shyness.
He was in his mid-to-late thirties, dark brown hair, the same colour eyes and a slightly bent nose, as if it had once been broken and not reset properly. He was dressed conservatively — collared shirt, grey trousers, plain jacket - and if I'd had to take a guess, I would have said he was a City suit, burning in the fires of middle-management hell. He had a put-upon look, as if he could never quite get his head above water.
'So what is it you do, David?' he asked as the food arrived.
'I find missing people.'
'Like an investigator?'
'Yeah, a bit like one.' I smiled. 'Except I don't have a badge to flash and I don't get to kick down doors. Much.'
Aron laughed. Jill gave a thin smile, as if I'd just offended her. I tried to work out what I'd said. Maybe the police comment.