You Were Gone: I buried you. I mourned you. But now you're back The Sunday Times Bestseller

by Tim Weaver

  Tim Weaver

  * * *

  YOU WERE GONE

  Contents

  DAY ONE

  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

  DAY TWO

  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

  DAY THREE

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  DAY FOUR

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  DAY FIVE

  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

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  DAY SIX

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  DAY SEVEN

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  AFTER

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  For Sharlé

  DAY ONE

  * * *

  1

  After it was all over, they let me watch the footage of her entering the police station. She seemed small, almost curved, in her green raincoat and dark court shoes, as if her spine was arched or she was in pain. The quality of the surveillance film was poor, the frame rate set low, which made it disorientating, a series of jerky movements played out against the stillness of the station’s front desk.

  She paused at the entrance, holding the main door ajar so that light leaked in across the tiled floor and seemed to bleach one side of her face. The faded colours of the film didn’t help, reducing blacks to greys and everything else to pastels, and even when she let the door go again and it snapped shut behind her, her features remained indistinct. Her gaze was a shadowy blob, her blonde hair appeared grey. I couldn’t see anything of the slight freckling that passed from one cheek to the other, crossing the bridge of her nose, nor the blue and green flash of her eyes. Under the glare of the camera, she may as well have been just another visitor to a police station.

  A stranger, nothing else.

  Once she let the door go, she headed across the room to the front desk. On the timecode in the corner I could see it was just before 8 a.m. An officer was standing behind the counter, engaged in conversation with someone else, a kid in his teens with a black eye and bloodied cheek. The woman waited patiently behind the teenager until the desk officer told her to take a seat. She did so reluctantly, her head down, her feet barely seeming to carry her to a bank of chairs.

  Ten minutes passed. The angle of the camera made it hard to see her, her head bowed, her hands knotted together in her lap, but then, after the desk officer finished with the teenager and told him to take a seat, she beckoned the woman back to the counter. I met the desk officer when I turned up at the station in the hours after: she had short black hair flecked with grey and a scar high on her left cheek, but on the film I couldn’t see the detail in either.

  The woman stopped at the counter.

  The desk officer bent slightly, so that her head was level with the woman’s, and even though the film’s frame rate was low and it didn’t record her lip movements in real time, I could still tell what she’d asked the woman.

  ‘You all right, love?’

  The woman didn’t respond immediately. Instead, she reached into the pocket of her coat and started looking for something. It began as a slow movement, but then became more frantic when she couldn’t find what she was looking for. She checked one pocket, then another, and in the third she found what she was after.

  As she unfolded the piece of paper, she finally responded to the officer.

  ‘Hello.’

  I couldn’t tell what the woman said after that, the frame rate making it all but impossible to follow the patterns of her mouth, but she shifted position and, because the camera was fixed to the wall about a foot and a half above her, I could see more of her, could see there was just a single line on the piece of paper. Under the pale rinse of the room’s strip lights, her hair definitely looked blonde now, not grey, and it had been tied into a loose ponytail. Despite that, it was messy and unkempt, stray strands everywhere, at her collar, across her face, and even within the confines of the film, the way it twitched and jarred between frames, it was easy to tell that she was agitated.

  Finally, her eyes met the officer’s and the woman held up the piece of paper and started to talk. I could see the teenager look up from his mobile phone, as if sparked into life by what the woman was saying. They told me afterwards that the woman had been crying, that it had been difficult to understand what she’d been talking about, that her voice, the things she’d been saying, had been hard to process. I watched the desk officer lean towards her, holding a hand up, telling the woman to calm down. She paused, her body swaying slightly, her shoulders moving up and down, and gestured to the piece of paper again.

  This time I could read her lips clearly.

  ‘Find him.’

  2

  The call came on 28 December.

  I’d spent Christmas with my daughter, Annabel, in her house in south Devon. She was twenty-nine and lived within sight of a lake at the edge of Buckfastleigh with her thirteen-year-old sister Olivia. I’d only known the two of them for five years – before that, I’d had no idea I was even a father – and although, biologically, Olivia wasn’t mine, her parents were gone and I looked out for her just the same. Liv had now gone past the point of believing that an old man with a white beard came down the chimney with a sackful of presents, but she was still a kid, and kids always made Christmas more fun. We opened gifts, we watched old movies and played even older board games, we ate and drank and chased Annabel’s dog across a Dartmoor flecked in frost, and then I curled up with them in the evenings on the sofa and realized how little I missed London. It was where I lived, where my work was, but it was a
lso where my home stood – empty even when I was inside it. It had been that way, and felt like that, every day for eight years, ever since my wife Derryn had died.

  The morning of the call, I woke early and went for a run, following the lanes to the west of the house as they gently rose towards the heart of the moors. It was cold, the trees skeletal, the hedgerows thinned out by winter, ice gathered in slim sheets – like panes of glass – on the country roads. After four miles, I hit a reservoir, a bridge crossing it from one side to the other. Close by, cows grazed in the grass, hemmed in by wire fences, and I could see a farmer and his dog, way off in the distance, the early-morning light winking in the windows of a tractor. I carried on for a while until I reached a narrow road set upon a hill with views across a valley of green and brown fields, all perfectly stitched together. Breathless, I paused there and took in the view.

  That was when my phone started ringing.

  I had it strapped to my arm, the mobile mapping my route, and I awkwardly tried to release it, first from the headphones I had plugged in, then from the pouch it was secured inside. When I finally got it out, I could see it was a central London number, and guessed it was someone who needed my help, somebody whose loved one had gone missing. Very briefly, I toyed with the idea of not answering it at all, of protecting my time off, this time alone with a daughter I’d only known for a fraction of my life, and was still getting to know. But then reality hit. The missing were my ballast. In the time since Derryn had died, they’d been my lifeblood, the only way I could breathe properly. This break would have to end and, sooner or later, I’d have to return to London, to the work that had become my anchor.

  ‘David Raker.’

  ‘Mr Raker, my name’s Detective Sergeant Catherine Field.’

  Thrown for a moment, I tried to recall if I’d come across Field before, or had ever heard anyone mention her name.

  ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘It’s a bit of a weird one, really,’ Field responded, and then paused. ‘We’ve had someone walk into the station here at Charing Cross this morning. She seems quite confused.’ Another pause. ‘Or maybe she’s not confused. I don’t know, to be honest.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, unsure where this was going.

  ‘She doesn’t have anything on her – no phone, no ID. The only thing she brought with her is a scrap of paper. It’s got your name on it.’

  I looked out at the view, my body beginning to cool down, the sweat freezing against my skin. My website was only basic, little more than an overview and a contact form, but it listed my email address and a phone number.

  ‘I expect she found me online,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Field replied. She cleared her throat, the line drifting a little.

  ‘So are you saying she wants my help?’

  ‘I’m not sure what she wants.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She says she knows you.’

  ‘Knows me how?’

  Field cleared her throat for a second time. ‘She says she’s your wife.’

  I frowned. ‘My wife?’

  ‘That’s what she says.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, my wife has been dead for eight years.’

  ‘Since 2009,’ Field replied. ‘I know, I just read that online.’

  I waited for her to continue, to say something else, to tell me this was a joke at my expense, some bad-taste prank. But she didn’t. Instead, she said something worse.

  ‘This woman, she says her name’s Derryn Raker.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Derryn Alexandra Raker.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No way. She’s lying.’

  ‘She seems pretty convinced about it.’

  ‘It’s not Derryn. Derryn’s dead.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s the other thing she said,’ Field replied, her voice even, hard to interpret or analyse. ‘She tells me she’s really sorry for what she’s put you through – but now she wants to explain everything.’

  3

  I didn’t get back into London until after four thirty, and by the time I arrived at Charing Cross the city was dark, its streets frozen. I felt numb as I climbed the steps, unsure of myself, angry, dazed. The phone call had created a hollow in my chest and I’d spent four hours on the motorway trying to close it up, trying to talk myself down.

  It wasn’t Derryn.

  It wasn’t my wife.

  I’d buried her eight years ago. I’d been with her at the hospital when they told us she had breast cancer. I’d sat with her when she was going through chemotherapy. I’d been there, holding her hand the first time, the second, the third when she told me she couldn’t carry on with it, because it wasn’t working and she was tired, so tired, of all the medicine and the sickness and the hospital visits. She’d sat with me on the edge of the bed, in the house that we’d shared, as I’d cried, as we’d both cried. She was the one that started me along the path to finding missing people, sitting there in a chair on our back deck, telling me it was a perfect fit for who I was. She was the one they’d carried out of the house on a stretcher on the morning only one of us woke up.

  The woman wasn’t Derryn.

  And yet, as I crossed the tiled floors of the station to where the front desk was, I couldn’t quite let go of the idea that I wanted it to be. That somehow, for some reason, it really had been a lie; the past eight years had been a mistake, some sort of deception at my expense. I’d never loved another woman like I’d loved Derryn, and the women I’d met since her death, who I’d dated and tried to love the same way, had eventually fallen away because of it. What if it was her? Did that mean I was sick? Delusional?

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  The desk officer was looking inquisitively at me.

  ‘I’m David Raker.’

  The surname instantly registered with her and she told me to take a seat. A couple of minutes later, DS Catherine Field emerged from a security door beside the desk. She waved me over. I got up, my legs weaker than they should have been, my heart beating hard against my ribs, and we shook hands. She was in her thirties with sandy hair, clipped at the arc of her forehead and falling against her shoulders, and had grey eyes that matched the colour of her trouser-suit, the jacket buttoned up at the front.

  She led me into a long corridor. I could hear telephones and the hum of conversation. Through a window, I glimpsed an office, a whiteboard with notes in blue and green pen, and a map of central London, pinned with pictures and Post-its.

  At the end, we moved through a second security door, and as Field held it open for me she spoke: ‘Thanks for getting here so quickly. I know this is …’

  She faded out.

  I’d told her on the phone that it wasn’t Derryn. I told her everything I’d already told myself, except I’d left out the parts about wanting it to be her, much less the moments where I actually believed it might be. Closing my eyes for a second, I tried to clear my head. I needed to be lucid. When I faced this woman, when I tried to find out why she’d pretended to be Derryn, I needed my emotions pushed all the way back.

  Field came to a halt in front of another office that – except for an interview room – was exactly the same as the first. There was a small Christmas tree on a desk in the corner, tinsel snaking through its fake branches, and a few token baubles hanging from filing cabinets and the corner of the whiteboard. Beyond that was the interview room, its door slightly ajar.

  People in the office glanced at me, plain-clothes officers in the middle of phone calls or working at computers. I heard warm air being pumped out of a heating unit above my head, could feel it against my face. The longer I stood there, the more the heat started to create a haze behind my eyes, a blur, a fog that made me feel unsteady on my feet and vaguely disquieted: except it wasn’t the heat that was getting to me, and it wasn’t the detectives staring in my direction – it was the woman inside the interview room.

  I could just see the slant of her back and some of her hair. Her legs were tucked in unde
r a table, most of her face was obscured by the door, and the clothes she was wearing – a red jumper and a pair of pale grey tracksuit trousers – didn’t fit. I doubted if they were the clothes she had turned up in. Those had probably been bagged as evidence and replacements provided by the police. She’d had no ID on her, couldn’t remember her address when asked, and she’d been in a distressed state, so the minute Field met her, she’d have treated the woman like a crime scene: kidnapping, imprisonment, being held against her will – Field would have considered all of them. That made her clothes evidence, her skin, her nails. They would have used an Early Evidence Kit too if there were signs of sexual assault or rape. They would have been through the database looking for the woman, for a history, searching under the name she’d given them for any record she may have had, or connections to anyone. The only person they would have found was me. Derryn had never got as much as a speeding ticket, but I was different: I’d been arrested before, cautioned, interviewed about cases I’d worked and people I’d gone looking for. If Field was searching for a lead right off the bat, she’d have got it, and when I glanced at her, I saw the confirmation: my entry on the database had rung alarm bells, and now I wasn’t just here assisting.

  I was a potential suspect.

  4

  I looked at Field and said, ‘My wife is dead.’

  I wasn’t sure if it was an effort to convince her or myself.

  Field glanced at me. ‘She died of cancer, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Breast cancer.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And this was in 2009?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ Field said, ‘like I said, I found that online.’

  She might have found it on a database somewhere, but more likely she’d got the details from the Internet. I’d never sought out notoriety, never given a single interview, but it hadn’t stopped journalists from camping outside my door in the aftermath of some of my most publicized cases. And now the results of that were out there on websites: insects frozen in amber that I could never cut out or dislodge.

  We looked at each other for a moment.