Vanished

by Tim Weaver

  ‘I made that call from where?’ I said.

  He looked at Craw again. ‘We can’t trust him. We can’t trust anything he says. Everything that comes out of his mouth is a fucking lie.’

  Craw said nothing, just stared across the room at him.

  Finally she got up from her seat. ‘Let me show you something,’ she said to me, and gestured for me to follow her.

  We moved along the route put in place by the scene-of-crime officer, through the kitchen and down to the office. A forensic tech was at the computer. Next to that, inside an evidence bag on the desk, was a letter, written on lined A4 paper. It was from Smart.

  ‘Simon,’ Craw said to the tech, ‘would you give us a moment, please?’

  The tech did as Craw asked, got up and disappeared.

  She pointed to the evidence bag. ‘This was left in the drawer of the desk. Why don’t you have a read?’

  I moved in front of her and studied the letter. It was headed with yesterday’s date, the writing untidy and spidery. The last outpourings of a dead man.

  My name is Edwin Smart, he wrote. I am the man who the media have labelled ‘the Snatcher’. I feel like the walls are closing in now. I could stay ahead of the police, just about, but now I’ve got this other investigator to contend with, this Raker, and I think they’re working together, and the more I try to cover up what I’m doing, the more I’m losing control.

  I heard Davidson enter the room behind us.

  It’s strange. Sometimes I don’t feel much like a killer. Sometimes I just feel like Edwin Smart. Ed. That guy is the guy everyone likes, the one they tell stories to and share jokes with. Some days I look in the mirror and I see that guy looking back, and I forget – just for a moment – who I am. Other days, all I can feel inside me is this ache, this need, and I remember who I truly am. A man who takes other men. A man who wants to touch them and feel them. Hurt them. A man who tortures and rapes them while they’re begging me to stop. What my father would call a queer. He hated them, but it was all an act. He used to come into my bedroom at night and touch me, used to make me take his dick out when I was barely even old enough to know what it was. He hated himself, just the same as I did – but it was him who made me this way.

  The letter covered all of one side and a quarter of the other.

  I turned it over.

  I hate who I am, but I can’t stop. I hate my father, but I still love him. I know I need to run, to get away from here, but I can’t. Tomorrow, his anniversary, is too special.

  I placed the letter back down again.

  Smart was a vicious, sadistic killer but one who was, at his most clear-headed, completely self-aware. In many ways, it was as sad as it was frightening.

  ‘A fucking screw-up, just like his dad,’ Davidson muttered from behind me. He moved in level with us. I glanced at Craw, but her eyes were fixed on the letter, as if she was determined not to give her feelings away. Davidson looked me up and down, as if I had no place being here. ‘You must be loving this,’ he said, loud enough so everybody could hear. ‘You can be a real cop for a day.’

  A ripple of laughter from somewhere in the kitchen.

  He snorted. ‘You’re a fucking amateur.’

  I looked him up and down. Unmoved.

  He leaned in to me, ready to go again, when Craw turned to him. ‘DS Davidson, why don’t you carry on with whatever you were doing?’

  He stood there, the two of them facing off.

  ‘Are you having trouble hearing me, Eddie?’

  He glanced at me, then at her. ‘No, ma’am.’

  He disappeared back into the kitchen, and then she turned to me, nothing in her face – no sense as to whether Davidson had pissed her off or not – and she handed me a business card. ‘We’re going to need a full statement from you in the next couple of days but, in the meantime, that’s my direct number on there.’

  I took it from her. She looked at me, silence between us, and it was obvious the tough decisions of the next few days were already weighing heavy on her.

  ‘I’ll see you soon, Mr Raker.’

  77

  All six men – Steven Wilky, Marc Erion, Joseph Symons, Jonathan Drake, Sam Wren and Duncan Pell – made it as far as hospital alive. Symons and Erion were in the worst condition and, as doctors tried to rehydrate them and repair some of the damage left on their bodies, Symons slipped into cardiac arrest, as if the only thing that had kept him alive in Edwin Smart’s basement was the lack of movement. He lasted another fifteen minutes, two of those a desperate attempt to revive him after he flatlined. But at just gone midnight, as I lay in bed across the city, unable to sleep, there was no more fight left in Joseph Symons and doctors pronounced him dead. The others clung on.

  Doctors talked of the complications of the men’s injuries, of amputations and skin grafts and transplants, and the long road to recovery. Drake was relatively unharmed, on the surface at least. In the days that followed, though, he recounted how he’d been raped, how Smart had taunted him in the dark, how he woke up some nights and could feel him there, in the basement, but never see him. He revealed a little of the last conversation he’d had with Smart – the only conversation of any note – where Smart had talked of his father, also called Jonathan, and what his father had turned him into.

  ‘In that last conversation we had, before you found me, he started telling me about his upbringing,’ Drake told the police in his statement. ‘He said they used to call him “Ed Case” at school because he was always in trouble. He said he got caned fourteen times once, because he told a teacher to fuck off.’ Drake had paused at that point. The detective taking his statement thought it was because it was becoming too emotional for him. But it wasn’t that at all. It was that, just like I had after reading Smart’s suicide note, Drake felt a strange kind of sorrow for Smart, a sorrow he was desperately trying to fight because of everything Smart had done to him. ‘He said he grew up without a mother; that she died when he was one, so his father brought him up. He said he sometimes wondered whether life might have turned out differently if his mother had lived.’

  Duncan Pell – never a victim like the others but, in a different way, manipulated by Smart as well – had been semi-conscious as they’d brought him out. When he got to hospital, Craw posted an officer outside his room. Pell and the police had a lot to talk about too, not just in terms of his involvement with Smart, but about who Smart was as a person. In order to close the case, the police would have to use Pell to fill in the blanks, and then – beyond that – they would start looking into the terrible things he’d done too.

  Sam was in the best shape of all, although the term barely seemed appropriate to describe a man who’d been brutally assaulted, over and over, for the entire time he was missing. I headed down to the hospital after finishing at the Smart house, and saw Julia Wren briefly. I told her we’d catch up when the time was right. She thanked me but in her face I could see her mind was elsewhere, and I didn’t blame her for that. Her husband had returned, six months after disappearing into thin air. All she had for him were questions, one on top of the other, but – given everything I’d found out about him; all the secrets he’d kept from her and from himself – I doubted whether his answers would ever bring her the comfort she sought.

  A couple of nights later, with Sam still in hospital, she called me at home and we talked for a while. ‘He keeps saying sorry to me,’ she said, but I couldn’t tell over the phone whether that made it better or worse for her.

  ‘Where do you think you guys will go from here?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I guess it’s just one step at a time.’

  ‘I guess it is.’

  ‘I know he regrets what he’s done. I just …’ She paused. I thought I might know where the conversation was about to go, but I didn’t jump in. ‘It just doesn’t feel like I thought it would feel, having him back. Does that sound strange?’

  ‘No,’ I told her. ‘That doesn’t sound strange at all.’


  The question that would probably never be answered completely was why Smart had treated Sam differently from the others, and why he felt he was worth taking such a risk over. With Smart dead, there could only be more theories and more guesswork. But as I’d sat there in his living room after finding the basement, waiting for Craw to come through, I’d looked at the photographs Smart had left behind and seen something in them. In the way his father stood. In his blue eyes and fair hair. In his thin frame and the far-away look in his eyes, troubled and isolated. It was a picture that recalled the very first photograph Julia had ever shown me of Sam, standing there in front of a window, drained and ground down, a week before he disappeared. No one could know for sure, but maybe, in Sam, Smart saw the man he loved and hated like no other. And maybe, by taking a man who looked like his father, in a place he’d once worked, dressed in the T-shirt his father had worn at the end, Smart thought he could get closer to him than at any point since he’d died.

  By the time I got home after leaving Craw and the Snatcher team working their way through Smart’s house, it was almost 10.30 and, next door, Liz’s house was dark. I checked my phone for messages, knowing that there wasn’t one from her, then went through my email as well, knowing the same was true there. Once I’d showered and changed, I sat at the counter in the kitchen and thought about texting her, but couldn’t find the right words – and, in some part of me, I wasn’t sure if I’d mean them anyway.

  An hour later I went to bed, and I lay awake most of the night.

  78

  The next morning the doorbell woke me. I stirred on the edge of sleep, unsure whether I’d even heard it, and then it came again, longer and louder. The clock said it was 8.58.

  I sat up in bed and looked out through the curtains. The sun was shining again, the skies clear. I grabbed a T-shirt and a pair of tracksuit trousers and wriggled them on, then moved through the house to the front door. I’d been expecting, maybe hoping, for Liz.

  Instead I got Healy.

  He looked terrible, like he hadn’t slept all night: his hair was a mess, not combed through or styled, his face etched with dark lines, his eyes bloodshot. His clothes were dishevelled, one half of his shirt tail hanging out, his tie loosened, his trousers creased.

  I pulled the door open.

  ‘Healy.’

  He didn’t say anything, just looked at me, and behind him – out on the street – I could see his Vauxhall, bumped up on to the pavement outside the gates. Behind that was another car, a grey Volvo. In the driver’s seat, Melanie Craw was leaning over the steering wheel, watching us. When I invited Healy in, she nodded at me, started up the engine and pulled away. I watched her head off down the street and then turned to Healy.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  He stood there in the silence of the house, looking at me.

  ‘Healy?’

  ‘Have you got any coffee?’

  I looked at him. ‘Sure.’

  We moved through to the kitchen and he sat at the counter while I brewed some coffee. Once it was on the go, I leaned against the sink, watching him, and for a moment he just stared at the floor, eyes dull and chipped, no light in them at all. After a while he seemed to become aware of the quiet and, with a long, drawn-out breath, looked up at me.

  ‘Craw found me,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Found you where?’

  A pause. Eyes on the floor again. ‘Parked on the road outside the prison.’

  ‘Which prison?’

  ‘Belmarsh.’

  ‘What were you doing down there?’

  He glanced at me and shrugged. ‘Sleeping in my car.’

  ‘Why?’

  He smiled. Sad and tight. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Is that where you were yesterday when I called?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘What’s at the prison?’

  He didn’t reply.

  I paused; let him have a moment.

  He placed a hand flat to the counter top and looked down at his fingers, stained, blistered and cut. Then he sighed, deep and long, as if there weren’t enough words to put it all together. ‘At the beginning of January, I found something out,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something I guess I probably shouldn’t have.’

  I pulled a stool out and sat down across from him.

  ‘A guy I’ve known for years, an old drinking buddy of mine, works down at Belmarsh, in the high-security unit there.’ He sniffed. ‘About a week before I started back at the Met, I went out for a few with him and we got pretty pissed. Pretty emotional, I guess. He knew Leanne, knew the boys … I mean, our kids had grown up together.’

  He brought his fingers into a fist.

  ‘He said there was this psychologist who came in every Monday to talk to the lifers down at Belmarsh. You know, the really worthless arseholes. The no-hopers.’

  I was trying to work out where this was going.

  ‘Anyway, we were there, just the two of us, too many beers, too much emotion – I mean, this was only, like, eight weeks after I buried Leanne – and he let slip she did the counselling for a lot of these pricks. All over the place. The rapists and the killers; the paedos and the sacks of shit who don’t deserve to see the light of day … and she …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This guy, my pal, he said she did exactly the same thing over at Broadmoor.’

  My heart sank. ‘Oh shit, what have you done?’

  He looked up, a shimmer in one of his eyes. Broadmoor was where Leanne’s killer had been shipped off to.

  ‘Healy?’

  He shook his head but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Healy?’

  ‘That fucking prick took my girl.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  His face coloured. ‘Are you listening to what I’m saying?’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘You were there. You saw it. He took my girl from me.’

  ‘Healy, what did you –’

  ‘He took my fucking girl from me!’

  His voice crashed around the kitchen, a noise so loud it seemed to rattle the glass in the window frames. And then when silence settled around us again, all I could hear was the coffee percolator and Healy, looking down into his lap, sniffing gently.

  He was crying.

  ‘Healy, look, why don’t –’

  Out of his jacket pocket he brought a gun, laying it on the counter top. The barrel was pointing towards me, but he immediately turned it around so it was facing off the other way. When he eventually looked up, tears streaming down his face, he pushed the gun across the surface towards me. ‘Take it,’ he said.

  ‘What the hell are you doing with this?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know any more.’

  ‘Were you actually going to use it?’

  ‘I …’ His eyes turned to the gun. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. If I used her to get me inside Broadmoor …’ He flicked a look at me. Shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you really think you could walk into a prison with a gun?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You wouldn’t even get through the front gates.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So what was the plan?’

  He looked at me. ‘I’ve been dating her since April.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She thought it was real.’

  I rubbed a hand to my brow. ‘This is insane.’

  ‘I know. I didn’t …’ He stopped. ‘I’m not sure I was ever going to use that thing, but she kept refusing to take me inside. She wouldn’t even take me inside Belmarsh, and I’d been getting inside there myself, just watching her, for six months. I was already inside Belmarsh. What I wanted was to be inside Broadmoor. But while I had a job, while it was going all right at the Met, I was prepared to wait. Do it the right way. I could chip away at her until she gave in and started letting me tag along. I’d tell her it was field research, and eventually she’d take me r
ight into the lion’s den. And then I’d get in the same room as him, and I’d stick a fucking knife in his throat.’

  ‘This isn’t you, Healy.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You’re talking about killing a man.’

  ‘He took my girl.’

  ‘But you’re not him. You’re not a killer.’

  ‘Killing him would have made me feel something,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t bring Leanne back, but it would give me something. What else have I got?’

  I looked at him. ‘You’re not a killer,’ I said again.

  ‘No job, no family,’ he replied, as if he hadn’t heard me.

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so said nothing.

  He wiped his eyes a couple of times and looked across me to the percolator. ‘How about that coffee?’

  I got up and poured us both a cup.

  ‘How did Craw find out about the prison?’

  ‘She called me.’

  ‘This morning?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Said she wanted to chat about what happened yesterday. Said I wasn’t getting my job back but she wanted to talk. So I told her where I was.’

  ‘Why were you even at the prison in the first place?’

  ‘I don’t know really.’ He paused. ‘Just seemed right. I’d been watching Teresa – this psychologist – come and go out of that prison since January. Since the time I got my job back. And by the time I was done yesterday, my job was gone, and so was she.’

  ‘What do you mean “gone”?’

  ‘Oh, she’s fine,’ he said. ‘I had a moment of clarity about five minutes after I got to hers. A flash of déjà vu. All the anger I felt for her, just building and building in me, was all the anger I felt for Gemma when she told me she was having an affair.’