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

by Tim Weaver

  Nothing.

  I felt around in my coat pocket for a packet of sterile gloves – lifted from a pile I always kept at home – and then paused. However careful I was, I was going to leave trace evidence behind. Skin flakes. Fibres. Hair. Fragments of who I was. Maybe that wouldn’t matter if the Met had no idea the woman had come to the flat, but if they ended up here, it would matter a lot. If they matched one skin or hair sample to me, they would know I’d accessed the property. Worse, they might begin to believe I’d genuinely come here to hurt the woman.

  I took an automatic step back.

  First, she’d appeared out of nowhere claiming to be my wife. Then a doctor had lied on her behalf, telling police I’d had to be committed. Then someone had snuck into my house and stolen paperwork from me that would have helped prove my story. What if this was the next part? What if that person expected me to come here?

  What if this was a trap?

  I continued pulling the gloves on, but more slowly now, still undecided about what to do. The door had no handle, just a basic Yale cylinder lock, so the only way to check that it was secure was by laying a hand on it.

  I pushed, but it didn’t budge.

  So are you going in or not?

  Looking along the walkway, all the way back to the stairwell, and then the other way, to the flat after this one – the last on this floor – I saw there were no windows on any of the flats, just doors. Each one was a different colour; only some had numbers.

  I was tempted to knock on the neighbouring flats, to see if they’d seen or heard anything, but doing that presented the same problems as with Gavin at Hammond’s: they’d remember me. I could dump a prepaid mobile where it would never be found; it was harder to defend yourself when an eyewitness could pick you out in a line-up.

  I waited for a moment, checked I was still alone, got out my picks and set to work on the Yale lock. It was simple, and didn’t take long.

  I gave the door a gentle shove.

  It juddered briefly against the frame and then, slowly, arced away from me, into the flat. As the door swung back towards me again, I stopped it with a gloved hand.

  Staying where I was, I took in the interior.

  A hallway ran from front to back, all the way through to the kitchen, and I could see the outline of cupboards, the edges of a laminate worktop, and a small window made from ridged glass that showed nothing but vague squares of light from adjacent buildings. There were three further doors in the flat: the one nearest to me looked like it went into a living room – I could see the edges of an empty TV stand – and the next must have been the bedroom, because the last one was a bathroom.

  I hesitated for a moment longer, then slowly started moving inside. The whole place felt airless. An extractor fan, high up above the kitchen worktops, rumbled softly, and somewhere else wind was escaping in, the sound like a child’s whimper.

  ‘Hello?’ I said quietly.

  In the living room there were the ghostly shapes of photo frames still visible on the walls and the impressions of furniture embedded in the carpet, and just one curtainless window: its view was of the nearby tower block, shrouded in fog.

  The bedroom was also empty and, in the bathroom, modern and newly installed, one of the taps was dripping. I moved through to the kitchen. There was nothing in any of the cupboards, the shelves entirely empty.

  No one was living in the flat.

  If the woman had spent time here, it had only been temporary. There was no evidence of clothes, of food, no smell of cooking, or perfume. If she was returning day after day, as part of some routine, it seemed unlikely she wouldn’t have been seen and heard. The flats were packed in so tightly. The walls were thin. Standing in the kitchen, I could hear the TV from next door – and not just a vague hum but actual words being spoken. Using saucepans and frying pans in here, turning lights on and off, walking around, all of that would have registered with a neighbour, and I just didn’t get the sense that that was what the woman would want. If it was, why fail to mention this place to Field? She’d talked about Woolwich, but never here, a property in a district ten miles from the train station she’d used and the pharmacy she claimed to have been left at.

  So why had she come to the flat last night?

  I returned to the walkway, clicking the door shut behind me, and peeled off the gloves. Pulling up my hood again, I looked out over the edge – to the ashen city, the mist, the people, and then to a car moving into the estate. It was a grey Volvo. I watched as it nosed its way into one of the parking bays reserved for residents and, as it did, something instinctive kicked in, a low-level alarm: somehow I just knew it didn’t belong here. A few seconds later, both the passenger and driver’s side doors swung open. I stayed there, looking over the rail: I didn’t recognize the man getting out of the passenger side. But I recognized the driver.

  Shit.

  It was Field.

  I didn’t have time to think about why she was here – I just needed to get out without her seeing me. I headed for the stairwell, keeping back from the edge of the walkway in case she looked up from the parking bay. At the stairs, I paused, listening for footsteps. I couldn’t hear any – just the incessant leak of dripping water.

  I took two steps at a time down to the fourth floor, listened, and then did the same down to the third. At the second, I heard them: Field and a male voice.

  Darting into the second-floor walkway, I sidestepped immediately to my left, where I knew there would be a ridged cove under the steps, created as the stairwell spiralled upwards, because it was exactly the same on the fifth. It was the only place to hide – the walkways were absolutely straight up and down otherwise.

  ‘… shitty weather.’

  It was the man speaking.

  ‘You working New Year?’ he asked.

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ Field replied. ‘Although Mike said he’s bringing his mum around for dinner, so I might try and wangle some overtime.’

  The man laughed. ‘I forgot about your mad mother-in-law.’

  And then they were past me, heading up towards the third floor. I waited, counting footsteps in my head, and when I thought they must be close to the fifth-floor walkway, I moved back to the stairwell and made for the ground floor.

  As I exited, I kept my head down, more conscious than ever of being caught on film, and finally emerged on to Chalk Farm Road. I headed straight for the Tube. I’d made it out without being caught, but that did little to settle my nerves: Field knew about the flat – which meant the woman must have told her about it since last night.

  And now I was starting to worry that I was right.

  Maybe I really had walked into a trap.

  22

  A few minutes after I got home, Spike called: he had the background I’d asked for on Erik McMillan. I grabbed my laptop from the bedroom and sat down at the living-room table.

  ‘There’s a lot of info,’ Spike said. ‘His phone records – mobile and landline – are there, and I’ve tried to attach a name and address to every number he’s called, or received a call from.’

  ‘Brilliant. Thanks, Spike.’

  ‘I’ve sent it all as a PDF.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, seeing that the email was already waiting for me.

  I hung up and dragged the PDF attachment on to the desktop. It was almost fifty pages long, the bulk of it made up of McMillan’s phone records. What was obvious, even at a quick glance, was that his home landline had gone the way of most people’s: he paid the line rental because he wanted the Internet, but he hardly used it to make any phone calls. Across the six months I was looking at, McMillan had made, on average, ten calls a month from his home and received about the same. On the other hand, his mobile phone statements for the same period ran to forty pages.

  I set those aside and moved on.

  McMillan lived in a huge detached house in Kew, between the botanical gardens and the National Archives. When I went to Street View in Google, I found out just how big: it went bac
k about eighty feet, with another sixty-odd foot of garden beyond that, and was built on three floors. On a satellite shot, it looked like his was the biggest house, not only on the road but in the entire zigzag of homes that existed between the Thames and the South Circular. The front was red brick, with white render around the doors and windows, but at the side it was sand-coloured London stock brick. There was also an unusual extension there that looked like some sort of converted chimney stack: it was tall and quite narrow, but had a series of long windows dotted all the way up it.

  According to mortgage statements, and an insurance policy that McMillan had renegotiated back in April, he had a daughter who was twenty-one. I found her online quickly: she was studying Medicine up in Edinburgh. That meant he’d been in a relationship once, but while the house seemed ridiculously big for just one person, I couldn’t find any evidence that he was sharing it with anyone at the moment, so if he’d been married, or attached, I got the sense that he wasn’t any more. I wondered if he’d retained the property in some kind of settlement, but from the documents Spike had sent me, there was nothing to suggest that. I made a note to chase it down.

  I worked my way through another insurance policy that McMillan had taken out and gathered a few more personal details and, elsewhere, saw that he’d listed the value of his house as £2.2 million. On a mortgage application, he’d noted his yearly salary as £108,329. None of that was especially interesting: I already knew the house was big, and as the Clinical Director at a London psychiatric unit, he was always going to be on good money.

  Eventually, I ended up back at his mobile phone records.

  I methodically worked through the numbers he’d called, as well as the ones that had called him, seeing if I recognized any of the people he’d been in touch with, or the home addresses that were registered to them. I didn’t. Once I was certain of that, I began entering the names into a document of my own, alphabetically listing them so it would be easier to come back to afterwards. It took patience: the first time I checked the clock, I realized I’d been going for over an hour; the second, almost two. By the time I was finally done, when I went through to the kitchen to make myself a coffee, the sky had already begun to alter, fading as the day slowly burnt out.

  Back in the half-light of the living room, I went through the names again, drawing connections where I could back to McMillan. Most appeared to be friends or people he worked with. As I’d already found out, he didn’t do social media himself, but that didn’t mean he didn’t appear on his friends’ Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds, and – on occasion – his daughter’s too. None of the photos I found rang any alarm bells, though: McMillan wasn’t trying to hide, the things he was doing – going out for meals, drinking at pubs, social events, charity dinners – were prosaic and normal. He was always smartly dressed, his black hair showing no signs of grey, his trademark red glasses staying on for some pictures and removed for others. On one friend’s Instagram page, I found a group shot, some sort of university reunion, everyone’s names listed below, which allowed me to tick off a whole raft of people that McMillan was in regular contact with.

  By the time I was done, there was only one anomaly: a call made to McMillan the previous day, not long before I’d arrived at Charing Cross police station.

  It was from a landline: an 0208 number. In Spike’s notes, he’d assigned no address to the landline, just a road. Cavanagh Avenue. When I looked it up, I saw it was at the south-west edge of Plumstead Common. I paused there for a moment, considering something else: Plumstead Common was less than a mile from Woolwich, where the woman claimed to have come from, and about two and a half miles from Thamesmead, where St Augustine’s was located. Could that be relevant?

  I wondered why Spike might not have followed this number up properly. Maybe it was an oversight. Maybe he’d forgotten to run it down. He was normally reliable, meticulous and precise, but tracking names and addresses was tedious work, even if you were being paid for it, so it wasn’t impossible that this was an error.

  Unless it wasn’t an error at all.

  I went to Street View.

  Cavanagh Avenue was a small cul-de-sac just off Plumstead Common Road, and snaked south from the bottom edge of the hundred-acre park. It didn’t take me long to find out the reason Spike hadn’t written down a name or a house number for the landline: it didn’t belong to a home or a business.

  It belonged to a phone box.

  Someone had called McMillan from a payphone.

  It was on the corner of Cavanagh Avenue, on the other side of the street from the park. The cul-de-sac was mostly small terraced houses – two windows at the top, a single window and a door at the bottom – but on the corner, where the phone box was located, and where Cavanagh Avenue became Plumstead Common Road, there were a series of businesses, their windows obscured behind red metal cages: a grocery store-cum-off licence, a Polish deli, a Bangladeshi takeaway and a newsagent.

  Why had someone called McMillan from here?

  It was rare that people chose to use phone boxes now – mobile phones were relatively inexpensive, calls either free with a contract or a matter of pence on a pay as you go. In fact, the main – perhaps only – reason to use a phone box these days was if you were keen not to be identified. The person who’d got in touch with Erik McMillan evidently didn’t want the call traced back to them. But just because the call came from a phone box, it didn’t mean the caller couldn’t be ID’d.

  There just needed to be a camera nearby.

  A moment later, the doorbell rang.

  Surprised, I turned at the living-room table and tried to look along the hallway to the front door. I wasn’t expecting visitors and I rarely, if ever, gave out my address – which made this what? The postman? Someone selling something?

  Or a journalist?

  On edge now, I got up from the table and made my way to the front door. There were two figures standing behind the frosted glass: one, I realized quickly, was Field; the other was the man I’d seen her with in Chalk Farm. They spotted me straight away – my shape in the hallway – as I moved slowly towards them, trying to imagine why they might have come all the way out here. But, in the end, I could only really think of one reason.

  Something had happened.

  And, whatever it was, it led back to me.

  23

  I unlocked the front door, my head still humming.

  If they simply had more questions – straightforward ones, standard queries that needed to be ticked off a list – Field could have just picked up the phone. So she was here for something else. Had she seen me at the flat in Chalk Farm? I’d been careful, so it was unlikely, but it didn’t mean I hadn’t walked into a trap, or was about to.

  Or maybe it wasn’t that at all.

  Maybe she’d come here because I’d told her the day before that I had all the evidence I would ever need at home and I could prove the woman’s deceit instantly. Except I couldn’t – not any more. Because I’d told her my evidence was the death certificate. And now I had no idea where that was.

  I pulled the door open.

  Field was dressed in the same dark blue skirt-suit and pale raincoat I’d seen her in at the flat in Chalk Farm. The man next to her was in his mid thirties, but his black hair had begun to grey and so had an untidy beard he’d allowed to creep towards the top of his cheeks. He had a blue RSI bandage on his right wrist and a phone in his other hand.

  I hadn’t met him yesterday at the station but I recognized him instantly as the person Field had been with at the flat. And by the way he was studying me, blue eyes narrowed, I knew he’d already made up his mind about me.

  ‘Mr Raker,’ Field said. ‘This is Detective Constable Gary Kent.’

  He nodded, still watching me closely.

  ‘Do you think we could come in?’

  I backed away from the door. Field wiped her feet on the mat, but Kent just walked straight through to the living room, his boots leaving muddy imprints on the floorboards. Ther
e were going to be bigger battles to fight, but it annoyed me nonetheless. I watched him as he leaned in to look at photographs of Derryn.

  ‘Do you want something to drink?’ I said to Field.

  ‘No, we’re fine, thank you.’

  She followed me through to the living room where Kent had now picked up a picture of Derryn and me, taken at Imperial Beach in San Diego. Again, I felt irritated at the way he was systematically working his way along the sideboard, touching everything, minutely adjusting all their positions.

  ‘Please don’t touch those,’ I said.

  He stopped. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, although his apology conveyed little in the way of actual contrition. He looked at me and then back to the photographs and shrugged.

  I kept my eyes on Kent for a second and then directed Field to one of the sofas. She casually glanced around the living room herself, taking in the decor, the layout, the things I had on show: she was doing exactly the same thing as Kent – checking out the pictures of Derryn – but she was just doing it more subtly. Thankfully, I’d put my laptop and notepad away, as well as all the printouts I’d made from the PDF that Spike had sent me.

  ‘So,’ Field said, removing the same pad as the day before, ‘early this morning, we went to talk to the woman claiming to be your wife. We arranged to drive over to the hostel we’d put her up in. From our side, the arrangements were pretty clear.’

  I frowned. ‘She wasn’t there?’

  ‘No, she wasn’t,’ Field responded, a bite to her voice now.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out.’

  I eyed them both and, as I did, it dawned on me: they can’t find her.

  ‘She’s disappeared?’

  ‘The people at the hostel said she never turned up last night.’

  I couldn’t work out if I should be pleased or concerned. If the woman had stayed at the flat in Chalk Farm overnight, that explained why she hadn’t been at the hostel – but it didn’t explain why Field and Kent had gone to the flat, or how they had found a connection to it.