Vanished

by Tim Weaver

  It was my file.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t need to explain.’ He was referring to a case the October before. His eyes flicked up at me. ‘Says here that, on 23 October of last year, you turned up at a house up in north London and there were two dead bodies inside.’

  I gazed at him. ‘If that what it says, it must be true.’

  He didn’t say anything else, just scanned the rest of the file. When he was done, he took a step back from the porch. ‘Most civilians go their whole lives without reporting a crime like your one.’ Sallows looked at me again, and I got the sense this was somehow personal for him, that he’d specifically asked to be here. Have we crossed paths before? ‘I mean, it’s a hell of a thing, stumbling across a scene like the one you found, right?’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s the nature of my work, sadly.’

  ‘Missing persons?’

  ‘People who are missing for a long time tend not to turn up alive.’

  ‘But you have to admit you’re like a magnet for trouble.’

  ‘Why would I have to admit that?’ I said to him. ‘If you’re accusing me of something, then come out with it. Otherwise, I think we’re done.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘You found that farm up in Scotland.’

  It had been eighteen months since I’d walked on to that farm and almost lost my life, and the scars on my body remained. Not as painful as they once were, because all pain died in time, but a reminder of what had been done to me, like a memory that would never fade. Sallows looked down at the first two fingers of my left hand, where the nails would never grow back, and then up to me.

  ‘That case …’ He stopped, shook his head, and his eyes flicked to me again. ‘I read some of the paperwork. I read your interviews, the statement you made, what you said went on up there. I was interested because, at the time, I had this religious nut going round killing people and dumping their bodies in Brockwell Park, and I thought to myself, “Maybe my case is related.” ’ He paused, studied me again. ‘It wasn’t, by the way.’

  I remained silent.

  ‘Here’s the thing, though: I’m not sure how much of your statement I believed. I mean, we all know what they did to you up there …’ His eyes moved to my fingernails again. ‘But there were gaps. Big gaps. There were bullet holes all over that place but no one to account for them. Not a single person. So who fired the guns? You said it wasn’t you. You said it was them. But they were either dead or they’d vanished into thin air.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So ten months later – in October last year – suddenly you’re back, and we’re picking the bones out of the mess you made in those woods over in east London.’

  I frowned. ‘Have you got a point, Sergeant Sallows?’

  ‘If you say that wasn’t you at that house yesterday,’ he said, ignoring me, a smile – lacking any warmth – lost beneath his moustache, ‘then I guess I’ll have to go with it. I mean, whoever it was wiped the place down, so it’s not like we’ve got any evidence. But witnesses at the warehouse say they saw an unidentified man running full pelt away from the scene dressed in only a coat, and a grey BMW 3 series leaving shortly after.’ He turned and made a show of eyeing my BMW, parked on the drive next to him. And then he looked back at me. ‘Not dissimilar to this one, actually.’

  He let that sit there.

  Again, I didn’t respond.

  Finally, he continued. ‘So if you say you weren’t there at the house, and you weren’t there driving that BMW, then I guess that’s what we have to run with. But it doesn’t mean I think you’re telling the truth.’ He paused and flipped the file shut, eyeing me before speaking. ‘In fact, quite the opposite. I think you’re a fucking liar.’

  38

  At Ealing Common Tube station, I grabbed a Travelcard and headed down the steps to the eastbound District. I was on my way to see Duncan Pell for a second time.

  It was two on a Saturday afternoon, so the platform wasn’t empty, but it was still pretty quiet. I moved about three-quarters of the way along, to where the sun arrowed through a gap in the roof. It must have been in the high twenties now: heat haze shimmered off the track, shadows were deep and long and the building shifted and creaked around me. A couple of seconds later, my phone went off.

  I grabbed it and looked at the display. Terry Dooley.

  Dooley was part of my old life; a source I’d managed to get my hooks into as a journalist, and one who had been forced to come along for the ride ever since. He was a reluctant passenger. In a moment of madness, he and three of his detectives had visited a brothel in south London, where things turned drunk and nasty and one of the cops put a prostitute in a neck brace. The next morning the story landed on my desk. I’d called him and offered to keep it out of the papers if, in return, he got me information when I needed it. It was a better trade for him: he was married with two boys, and if there was one thing Dooley hated more than dealing with me, it was the idea of battling for custody of his kids. I hit Answer. ‘Carlton Lane.’ Carlton Lane was where the brothel had been.

  ‘Funny,’ said a voice. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t answer.’

  ‘How you doing, Dools?’

  ‘Yeah, great,’ he replied with zero enthusiasm. The line drifted. I heard footsteps and then a door closing. ‘You got five minutes, then I’ve got to get the boys to football.’

  I’d called him as soon as Sallows had left. Dooley hadn’t answered, but I’d left a message on his voicemail, asking him to call me back. Tasker and Dooley were the two sources I used most from my previous life: Tasker was more reliable, more discreet and less prone to putting obstacles in my way; but Dooley was like the oracle. He kept his ear to the ground, knew the comings and goings at the Met, and had his fingers in all sorts of pies. I couldn’t work out why Sallows was trying to squeeze me. I’d made problems for myself by staking out the house, calling an ambulance for the girl and letting Wellis get the better of me, but there was still little for the cops to go on. A witness spotting a car a bit like mine wasn’t going to lead to the Met turning up on my doorstep, not if they didn’t even have my plates. So what had got Sallows interested in me?

  ‘Did you listen to the whole of my message?’ I asked.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘That’s great, Dools.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ He gave a little snort, as if by asking him to check his messages properly I was asking the impossible. I could see things his way: we went months without talking, and just as he started to believe he’d got rid of me from his life, he picked up the phone and there I was. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve got a real job here, not some Mickey Mouse operation like you.’

  I ignored him. ‘Does the name Kevin Sallows mean anything to you?’

  ‘Sallows?’

  ‘Yeah. You know him?’

  ‘Don’t know him personally, but I know of him.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Career cop. Old school. He was part of the Snatcher team.’

  ‘But he’s not any more?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly what went down.’

  ‘Which means what?’

  ‘Which means I don’t know exactly what went down. Not the gory details. That investigation is locked down tighter than a Jewish piggy bank.’

  ‘So what do you know?’

  ‘Something blew up between a couple of the cops there – something really big – and then Sallows got kicked off the case and shipped off to south London somewhere. He’s working the shitty cases they wouldn’t even give to a half-cop like you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Like I said, I don’t know the gory details.’

  ‘What about the edited highlights?’

  ‘You might wanna put in a call to your one-time sparring partner. He’d probably know more about it than I do. You can relive the days when you and him sailed into the Dead Tracks like Laurel and Hardy.’

  ‘You mean Healy?’

 
‘The very same.’

  ‘He’s working the Snatcher?’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t you ever watch TV?’

  ‘I haven’t been following the case.’

  ‘He’s manoeuvred himself back into the big time. Don’t ask me how he managed it. The shit you and him got up to last year, he should be getting bummed in the showers at Pentonville, and you should be there watching.’

  ‘What do you mean “back into the big time”?’

  ‘Way I hear it, he’s pretty much playing second fiddle to the SIO.’

  ‘Who’s the SIO?’

  ‘Melanie Craw. The chief clown at the circus.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘No. But people tell me she’s a bitch with ice for blood. You probably need to be when you’ve got a deranged killer pissing all over your career. I give it one more dead homo before they pull the plug on her.’

  ‘So she fell out with Sallows?’

  ‘Fell out, didn’t rate him, didn’t like the way he dressed – who knows?’

  ‘Has Healy been playing ball?’

  ‘Old Lazarus? Of course he has. He’s a clever bastard. He’s probably been on his best behaviour since the start of the year; probably managed to keep himself in check even while the people there are chipping away at him. But you can bet your arse he’s been spending the whole time plotting some sort of revenge mission.’

  ‘Against who?’

  ‘Who’d you think? Against everyone.’

  39

  9 April | Two Months Earlier

  Craw swivelled gently in her seat, half turned away from the men in her office, her gaze on the incident room. She wore every hour of the investigation on her face: dark rings under her eyes that she’d tried to disguise with make-up; the pale, almost translucent skin that shadowed insomnia; the far-away look of someone who’d imagined many times over what it would be like to walk away. Forty days after the third victim, Joseph Symons, went missing, they still had nothing.

  Next to Healy was Davidson. On the other side of Davidson was Sallows. On the left-hand side of the office were other, senior CID cops: Sampson, Frey, Richter and then Carmichael, who had a notepad in his hand and was tapping a pen against his thigh. He hadn’t written anything down yet.

  Finally, Craw looked back at the group. ‘I’ve got to do a press conference in two hours. I’ve got to go out there, in front of half the journalists in the country, and I’ve got to tell them what we’ve found and how we’re going to catch this bastard.’ She reached down in front of her and picked up a piece of paper off the desk. It was blank. ‘This is what we’ve found. What’s written on Carmichael’s pad is what we’ve found. Six weeks after Symons gets whisked off into the night, and we’re in the same place as we were when Wilky got taken. And he’s been missing eight fucking months.’ She smashed the flat of her hand on the desk – papers gliding off, pens rattling, her keyboard leaping from its position – and turned and looked out at the incident room again.

  Silence. Then the gentle squeak of her chair as it moved back and forth.

  ‘So one of you give me something.’

  Healy waited for Davidson or Sallows to leap in; to try and build something from nothing, just so they could score points, but even they realized it was pointless. The case had already crossed that line. What it needed now was something to jump-start it.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Healy said, and everyone in the office turned to him.

  He glanced briefly at Davidson and Sallows, their eyes narrowing, a faint look of disgust on Davidson’s face. Sallows made an obvious show of smacking his lips together like anything Healy said left a bad taste in his mouth.

  ‘What is it, Healy?’ Craw asked.

  Healy turned his attention to her. ‘In October 2010 a man was found stabbed to death on Hampstead Heath. He –’

  ‘We’ve already been down that road, Colm,’ Davidson said, a hint of amusement – unseen by Craw – on his lips. When he turned to Craw, he’d wiped his face clean: no amusement, no expression of any kind. ‘You’ll remember, ma’am, that DS Sallows came to see you about this case a couple of days after our first victim, Steven Wilky, went missing back in August last year. HOLMES put it forward as a possible connection, given the circumstances of Wilky’s disappearance.’

  Craw nodded, but her eyes didn’t leave Healy. ‘I remember,’ she said. In her face Healy could see an invitation to continue, not just because she was desperate for a lead, but because she wanted to see whether her instincts about him had been correct.

  ‘I know Sallows looked at this before,’ he said, and shifted forward in his seat. He hadn’t made any notes on this; this was all from memory. A couple of days earlier, he’d come into work and found the drawers of his desk had been pulled out and tipped all over the floor. Later the same day, in a Snatcher briefing, when Craw had asked him something, he’d opened his notepad to find pages had been ripped out. He’d stumbled his way through her question, to the amusement of Davidson, Sallows and some of the other cops, but he’d looked disorganized and amateurish. Craw had shown nothing, but it must have put doubts in her head. Now he was going to redress the balance.

  ‘So what have you got that’s new?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing, ma’am.’

  ‘Then we’re done here.’

  ‘There are too many connections between the Snatcher victims and this case for us to bin it entirely,’ Healy continued. ‘Not without looking at it properly.’

  ‘We looked at it properly the first time, Healy,’ Davidson said.

  ‘We need to look at it again.’

  Sallows smirked. ‘Are you saying I can’t do my job?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You think I wasn’t thorough enough the first time round?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what?’

  But Healy wasn’t looking at Sallows, he was looking at Craw. She held his gaze for a moment and then scanned the room. ‘Who’s up to speed on the Hampstead Heath murder?’ Sampson, Frey and Carmichael all shook their heads. They would have seen that it had been marked up as an early potential lead when they joined the investigation after the second victim – Marc Evans – was taken, but they wouldn’t have gone into detail on it if it had already been relegated to a sideshow on Sallows’s say-so.

  ‘Okay,’ Craw said, looking at Healy, ‘you’ve got two minutes.’

  He nodded. Davidson glanced at Sallows and shook his head. Healy ignored them and looked at the other cops. ‘The victim’s name was Leon Spane.’

  ‘Spane?’ Sampson asked.

  ‘Yeah. S-P-A-N-E. Spane was a 28-year-old from Tufnell Park. His naked body was found on the edge of Hampstead Heath, near Spaniards Road, on 19 October 2010. He’d been stabbed in the throat. The blade went so deep it perforated the skin on the back of his neck. His penis had also been removed – post-mortem, with the same knife – and left in the grass next to him. Lividity suggested he’d been brought from wherever he’d been killed.’ Healy paused, letting them take it all in. All eyes were on him now, even those of Davidson and Sallows. ‘And whoever killed Spane had shaved him.’

  ‘Shaved him how?’ Carmichael said, from the back of the room.

  ‘Shaved his head,’ Healy replied. ‘Right before the body was dumped.’

  A tremor passed across the room, and a couple of the cops – Frey, who was the newest member of the team, and Sampson – both looked at Craw. Her eyes were still on Healy. ‘You understand why we dismissed it though, Healy – right?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘This is about as far from our guy’s MO as you can get.’

  Healy nodded. ‘I agree, ma’am.’

  ‘Our man takes them, and he keeps them. Or he leaves their bodies concealed. Or he dumps them somewhere remote. He doesn’t leave them on Hampstead Heath, in plain sight, in the middle of a city with 7 million people in it.’

  Healy nodded again.

  ‘The first victim, Wilky, has been missing since 11 August 2011,’ Craw we
nt on, ‘and we still haven’t found his body. The second, Evans, since 13 November. The newest, Symons, since 28 February. They don’t come back.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘He isn’t aggressive either,’ Sallows said, stepping in, sensing an opportunity to kill Healy off. ‘At least not at the scene. There are no signs of a struggle at any of the victims’ flats or houses, and no sign of a break-in. They all lived on their own, in their own places. Spane didn’t. Plus there’s the doubts over the hair: Healy says someone shaved Spane’s hair for him, but forensics say the hair was shaved before he died, so it’s just as likely – in fact, probably more likely – that Spane shaved it himself.’ Sallows paused, glancing at Craw, but she made no effort to stop him. ‘And what you can safely say about our guy, beyond all reasonable doubt, is that he isn’t the type of killer who’s going to dump a body and then spend the next minute messily chopping the victim’s dick off. In fact, with no bodies to find, our guy might not be a killer at all.’

  ‘What does he do with the men if he doesn’t kill them?’ Healy asked.

  Sallows glanced at Craw but didn’t say anything. Craw leaned forward at her desk and laid both hands flat to the surface. ‘Is that it, Colm?’

  ‘Don’t you think it would be worth looking into?’

  ‘Sallows looked into it.’

  He glanced at Sallows and then to Davidson; there was a hint of a smile on Davidson’s face again, as if he sensed the whole room were now seeing Healy for who he was: a fraud of a cop. ‘I’ll take this case,’ Healy said to her, ‘and I’ll run with it. It won’t impact upon my time, but I will report back as soon as I find anything. It’ll be off the books.’

  ‘Just like normal,’ Davidson said quietly, but loud enough to be heard.

  ‘Fuck you, Eddie.’

  ‘All right, calm down,’ Craw snapped, shooting them both a look. Davidson slid down into his chair, arms crossed on his belly, a satisfied smile on his face. Over his shoulder, like a parrot, Sallows was an exact replica. Craw turned to Healy. Everyone in the office was staring at him. Davidson winked, out of sight of Craw. Sallows had a look on his face that was so clear it was like Healy could see right into his head. You’re done, he was saying. You had your chance – and you crumbled. But Healy wasn’t about to crumble. Not now. Not in front of them.