But there’s another reason why I’m here.
Some people you’re better off dealing with at arm’s length. Not Joe Ellis: he’s one enemy best kept close. I feel safest when I’m in the room with him. Safest when I can see the whites of his eyes.
“Mind if I take a seat?” he says. When he sits he tosses the document case onto the chair next to him, the one farthest away from me. It’s heavy, lands with a soft thud. He’s brought me the file. But the scent of a deal has charged him up, and the way he smiles and sips his coffee and takes his time tells me this isn’t going to be as straightforward as I’d like.
“So,” he says after a moment. “ ’S been a while. I was beginning to think you’d retired. South of France, maybe.” He narrows his eyes. “Not Spain. Not your style.”
“I’ve taken a step back,” I say, as noncommittally as I can.
“Yeah, leave it all to someone else, why not? I would if I could. So: personal favor, eh?” His hand rests, lightly, on the document case.
“That’s right.”
I want him to open the case, hand over the file, but he doesn’t move. He’s watching me. He knows I don’t do “personal,” so he skim-read every page in that file as he pulled it off the Met’s Missing Persons database this morning. Now he’s wondering what this is all about.
“Christmas, eh?” he says. “What is it about Christmas?” and he smiles, showing white, even teeth. “I blame the ads. All those happy families, kids all smiling, peace-on-earth-goodwill-to-all-men … Like a knife in the guts to all the fucked-up lonely people.” He looks at me as if it’s me he has in mind. “No wonder you’re more likely to top yourself at Christmas.”
“But she didn’t,” I say. “She was gone weeks before Christmas. Walked out on the eighth.”
The date was in the news coverage. On the eighth of December, just over a year ago, Dr. Catherine Gallagher applied to the London hospital where she worked for a couple of weeks’ compassionate leave to visit her mother, who had—she said—been taken gravely ill. Dr. Gallagher was due back on the wards on Christmas Eve, and when she walked out of the hospital on the eighth everyone assumed she was coming back.
“Yeah,” he says, as if I’ve just proved his point. “Maybe she wanted to avoid the Christmas rush.” He pauses again to look me over.
“So tell me about her.”
“What d’you want to know?” It’s nowhere near as helpful as it sounds. He’s looking for my angle on this.
Keep it neutral, safe. “For a start: she wasn’t expected back at work until the twenty-fourth, but she was reported missing on the twenty-first.”
He shrugs. Bastard.
I try again. “She missed an appointment.”
Still Ellis doesn’t respond. He’s finding this entertaining.
“Ellis, busy people miss appointments all the time. It doesn’t usually trigger a Missing Persons inquiry.”
This time he can’t resist. “It does when it’s your shrink and he’s got you down as suicidal.”
That wasn’t in the news article. “A shrink? She was seeing a psychiatrist?”
Ellis’s eyes flick over me, assessing me. He’s a copper: always waiting for the lie. But he seems satisfied my surprise is real.
“Guy called Ian Graves. Appointment was for the twentieth. And she’s a good patient, regular as clockwork, never misses, so when she doesn’t show and doesn’t contact him to reschedule, he worries. He tries her mobile and her home number but she’s not answering. Goes round to her flat, no one home. Would have tried her work except it turns out she’d lied about that: told him she worked for some ad agency. Didn’t want her bosses to find out she was a potential wrist slasher.” Ellis snorts, softly, to himself. “Anyway, he reports it to us. ‘Concerned for the safety of a patient.’ He says she’s a suicide risk. Wants it taken seriously. You know what these people are like: always worried about liability, scared someone’s about to slap a lawsuit on them. He comes to us, it’s our problem.” He pauses and drains the sludge from the bottom of his cup.
“ ’Course,” he says, “quick check tells us she’s a doctor. Call to the hospital: they say she’s on compassionate leave. Dying mother. Stood to reason at the time: your nearest and dearest’s at death’s door, you don’t always think to check your diary, do you? Mum’s in a nursing home in Kent. Alzheimer’s. We call the nursing home.” Ellis smiles, though this one’s joyless. “And Mummy’s fine. Doo-lally, but fine. They haven’t laid eyes on Dr. Gallagher in over a month.”
“And you’ve got a Missing Persons inquiry.”
“Oh no, we’re looking for a body.” He hunts round for a wastebasket, spots one, pings the cup into it.
“Graves was that sure?”
He nods. “Everyone reckoned overdose. Well, it fits the MO, doesn’t it? With farmers it’s guns, with commuters it’s trains, with doctors it’s drugs. Overdoses, they’re most often at home or in their car. A crew went round. She lived alone. Wapping, one of the new blocks. Nice place, apparently, if a bit”—he fishes for the word—“soulless. Two weeks’ post piled up in the hall, and no body. No note but no clothes taken either, as far as they can make out, just her coat and her bag. Passport’s in a drawer, car’s in the street outside.”
“Bank account? Cards?”
“Last credit card use the weekend before. Last cash withdrawal on the seventh. A hundred quid, so she wouldn’t have lasted long on that. Last calls on her mobile and her landline on the evening of the seventh. Last-known sighting on the eighth, eight fifteen at night. There’s a security camera on the door of her building. She came home from the hospital, changed, went out again.”
“Neighbors see anything?”
“Nothing. Our lot knocked on doors, half the folk didn’t even recognize the photo. Pretty-enough girl but kept herself to herself. Same story at the hospital—she worked all the hours, didn’t socialize. Colleagues rather than friends. ‘Acquaintances.’ ”
“Lovers?”
“Not a trace.”
“Family?”
“Only child, Dad’s dead, Mum doesn’t even know her anymore. She walks out of her flat, she’s got nowhere to go, not that we could find.”
“Missing Persons circulated her details.”
“Hospitals, shelters, women’s refuges …” He shrugs again. It’s one of his settings, indifference; he uses it sometimes to lull interviewees. “She could have had a breakdown, ended up on the streets. It happens.”
“A bit organized, booking leave first.”
“Some people are funny like that. Or she might have been the type who fits her life into little boxes. Work in this box. Social life in another. Maybe she’s got a reason for that, maybe she’s into kinky sex with strangers, you wouldn’t want that getting out at work. Oh, we did check: Internet use, contact sites … Nothing.” He sits back. “Missing Persons got a press release out, media ran with it for a few days. Not much going on between Christmas and New Year’s, nice blond female doctor disappears … They like that sort of thing, it’s a story.”
I must have glimpsed her photo then, on TV or on a news site. Police are concerned for the safety …
“Any good leads?”
“A few sightings. Most of them ruled out. The helpful but mistaken. And of course the usual nutters and attention seekers crawled out the woodwork.”
“Confessions?”
“As you’d expect.”
“And then?”
“And then nothing. She’s on the database. Every time an unknown white female pops up, alive or dead, the system looks at her.” Ellis sniffs. Still in indifferent mode. “Richardson thinks she’s dead.”
“Richardson?”
“Guy who ran the original investigation, after she disappeared. I had a word.”
Already? On a Sunday morning? I didn’t ask him to do that, and he doesn’t usually do things he isn’t asked to, or isn’t going to be paid for. He’s latched on to this one, hasn’t he?
“Did he add anyt
hing?”
He grunts. “Screwed-up high achiever, suicide risk, tidy flat, CCTV shows her leaving alone, no sign of foul play, no note, no leads.” Another shrug. “He thinks she topped herself. Holed up somewhere she wouldn’t be found, big needle full of morphine and it’s ‘Goodnight, Irene.’ ”
“Why would she hide?”
“Shame. That’s the thing with doctors: always supposed to cope.” He nods at one of the calendars on the wall. “Nice tits,” he says, and then, although his voice is as casual as ever, suddenly he switches his copper’s gaze to me. “So what’s your interest?”
“Natural curiosity.”
He snorts. “Yeah, right. What’s Catherine Gallagher got to do with you? Did you know her?”
“If I had, I’d have been asking questions a year ago. Not now.”
“So: what? Where do you fit into all this?”
“I don’t fit.”
“You want the file. You’re asking questions.”
“It’s what I do.”
“Makes two of us.” He’s still watching me. “This is personal, isn’t it?” Then he leans forward, fixes on me. “You think she’s been murdered, don’t you?”—and he’s lost that casual tone completely. “Cut me in on this, Karla. You know you want to.”
I shake my head. “It’s nothing like that.”
“Oh no?” he says, then, almost to himself: “You didn’t know her, but you’re asking questions. She’s dead and there’s something we missed.”
I leave first. Park the Mondeo on a meter in Fulham—it will be collected from there within the hour—walk half a mile and then take a taxi to South Kensington, then a bus, and finally the Jubilee Line to Canary Wharf. By the time the escalators deliver me out into the weak sunshine again, it’s almost 1:00 p.m., and the file’s burning a hole in my bag.
I get back home to a winking message light: Johanssen, with a number for a pay phone. “Tell Dad,” he says. His voice is low and tired.
Fielding can wait. I pull out the file and go straight for the images, and there it is, the photo from the Internet, the same one Fielding gave to Johanssen. Catherine Gallagher.
By rights I should never have identified her. The blog piece I found was a freak survival; in every other Internet article on her disappearance—above captions reading Missing Doctor Catherine: No Leads and Have You Seen This Woman?—the space left for her picture is now blank.
Catherine Gallagher was thirty-one when she vanished. The file itemizes her appearance—the slim build, the blond hair. The photos are the sort you find on membership cards and in employment files. No informal snaps, nothing taken in a pub or at a party or on holiday. In all of them—even the ones in which she’s smiling—there’s something shuttered about her face.
There is only one unposed shot, and that’s the record of the last firm sighting of her: a blurry CCTV image of a pale-haired young woman in a long coat, frozen in movement, passing through a lobby toward a door. The time code in the bottom corner reads 20:15-08-12. The eighth of December, 8:15 p.m.: Dr. Catherine Gallagher walking out of her life.
She worked in the intensive care unit of a major London hospital, on her way to her first consultancy among drugged, passive patients. She worked hard, kept herself to herself. She came over as a little cold, maybe, a little distant, but highly efficient and trustworthy. Professional. None of her colleagues knew about her depression. To them she was self-contained, a loner, a high achiever. Good at her job, hard on herself. Driven.
The only person she allowed anywhere near the inside of her head was the psychiatrist, Graves.
They interviewed him at some length. I skim the notes. Fifteen months, regular appointments. (Ellis was right; she was always punctual, never missed a session.) History of depression. Low self-worth. Self-harm an evident risk. But no indication of why.
Because she’d killed, and it had begun to crack her open? But she wasn’t going to tell anyone that: not this one.
So what happened on the eighth of December?
She realized someone knew.
I go back to the CCTV grab: the woman in the long coat, heading for the door. Where’s she going? Not to the Program, not in her mind, not then. She’s told everyone her mother’s sick, and now she’s making her escape. I can’t make out her expression clearly, but her body language is relaxed; for someone in full flight she’s very calm.
Still, running; just not fast enough.
They caught her, and they put her in the Program—dropped her into that dark pool like a weighted corpse, the waters closing over her without a ripple. That’s the thing: even when the alert went out for her—although someone must have supervised the fingerprinting, the retinal scan, the strip search—no one ever said. She remains a missing person, her case file still open, the police convinced she killed herself and it’s only a matter of time before they find a body.
Who did you kill? And why is it a secret?
And then: Who wants you dead?
Some people fit their lives in little boxes … There’s a box somewhere that holds the truth behind all of this. And I must find it.
Where to start? Her friends? She had none. Her colleagues? The psychiatrist? But I can’t risk flagging my interest: it has to look routine, coincidental. A police investigation? A last quick trot through the facts before the file’s quietly shelved?
Ask Ellis?
But Ellis wants this too badly. Cutting him in would be a mistake.
“So what is it this time?” Ellis asks. It’s gone 2:00 p.m. when I get hold of him. He’s in an upmarket pub somewhere; I can tell from the background noises, the voices and the rattle of glasses and cutlery, the low throb of jazz: “So What” from Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.
“Catherine Gallagher,” I say.
“Just a moment.” He’s with someone—aside he adds, “Sorry, I’ve got to take this.” The background noise surges, then clears. “What about her?” he asks.
“It wasn’t suicide.”
“You got remains?” There’s that sharpness in his voice again.
“No.”
“But she’s dead.”
I brush past that. “Something happened. Could be something to do with her job. Something she did, something she knew. And I think someone may have come after her for it. If we can find out—”
“We?” he says.
“We.”
Ellis falls silent again. The offer’s on the table. He’s trying to work out what’s behind it.
“You know more than you’re telling,” he says at last.
“I’m telling you as much as I can right now. The fact is I don’t have a lot.”
“So what makes you think it’s to do with her job?”
“You read that file. Her work was all she had.”
“You think she did something bad? What? She offed a patient? You think she could have been another Shipman?” he says. “Or who was that other one, the nurse?”
He’s thinking of the God-complexed control freaks easing their charges prematurely from this world; or the adrenaline junkies inducing heart failure for the thrill of resuscitation, the chance to play the hero. But it wasn’t like that—it was messy, it was horrific—the client told Fielding so …
Ellis says, “ ’Cos it’s not clinical error, or if it was, there’s nothing on record,” and that startles me. So he’s checked her HR file too, has he? That was quick.
“Maybe it never came to light. Maybe it was hushed up. No one knew about her depression. Maybe she was good at keeping stuff hidden.”
“And you want someone to go back to the hospital, dig around.”
If he wants to believe she was murdered, let him. “When your friend Richardson interviewed her colleagues, everyone assumed she was a suicide. Even Richardson thought so. Someone needs to introduce the idea of foul play. Find out if anyone might have had a motive. See what comes out.”
“And what do I get?”
“The usual.”
“Cash for questions, eh?”<
br />
“You wanted in. Your choice. If you’re not interested, say so now.”
He grunts, but he’s going to do it. He’s a copper. He can’t help himself. Any more than I can.
Maybe that’s why, as soon as he’s off the line, I pull out Catherine Gallagher’s address in Wapping, and I make another call.
She lived in a cobbled street of warehouse conversions and newbuilds one block back from the river. When I arrive at 10:00 a.m. on Monday a young property rental agent’s waiting for me, in a suit, statement dark-framed glasses, and too much aftershave. He beams at me and shakes my hand. “Mrs. Christie? Shall we go in?”
The CCTV camera in the lobby isn’t working today—we’ve seen to that—but even so, as I cross its path I can’t help seeing my own blurred form with the time code superimposed below. Like Catherine Gallagher on the eighth of December, except Catherine Gallagher was going the other way. Catherine Gallagher was walking out of her life.
The police searched her flat back then, and they still hold a bare handful of her personal possessions—a diary, bank statements, a laptop. But the police were looking for a suicide, not a motive for murder. I’m counting on the chance there’s something they missed.
Up the stairs, to the first floor. The agent has the key and opens the door—“I think you’ll like the decor”—and I step in.
A tiny hallway. A mirror, a bland watercolor landscape—a year’s quiet dust furs the frames. The air is still, unused and stuffy. The place smells like something kept in a drawer for too long.
The agent closes the front door carefully behind us while I pull on latex gloves. “I’ll wait here,” he says and gives me an empty, professional smile as if what I’m doing is perfectly normal. His glasses wink at me. “Take as long as you like.”
His name is Sean, and he’s Robbie’s son, though he looks nothing like his dad—doesn’t have the stubborn bulldog head, the barrel chest. He’s slim, light on his feet, and with a delicacy in his features that he gets from his mother, a woman I’ve seen only in photographs; a woman already cold in the ground by the time Robbie began to work for Thomas Drew. Sean was seven then, a small boy in a West Ham strip. Robbie dreamed of a career as a professional footballer for his son—would have settled for an electrician or a plumber, but maybe some things are in your blood; now Sean’s twenty-one and working surveillance beside his dad. And as soon as I outlined the scenario to Robbie yesterday, he said, “Use Sean.”
The Distance: A Thriller Page 14