You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  But he never made it.

  ‘Maybe he forgot,’ I said, clutching at straws.

  ‘Maybe,’ she replied, but it was obvious that she didn’t believe that and she was about to tell me why. ‘Thing is, he was supposed to get on a 5.30 a.m. flight today from London City Airport as part of a two-night break in Florence. He never caught the flight. The airline confirmed he never even checked in. We can’t find him at home and DC Kent has spoken to St Augustine’s and they tell us that he definitely hasn’t changed his plans and clocked in with work either. In fact, he hasn’t been at work in an official capacity since before Christmas – apart from a brief visit on the night of the 29th to meet you, and then briefly again last night.’ She pointed at the picture. ‘According to all the information we have so far, you were the last person to come into contact with him yesterday.’

  My guts were twisting. I felt sick.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No what?’

  ‘I haven’t got anything to do with this.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ Field asked. ‘You can’t remember anything about last night, isn’t that what you said?’

  I looked at the photo again, my face illuminated by a street light. The tear tracks were clear on the right cheek: two shiny, vertical ribbons, one running in a straight line towards the corner of my lip, one running in a curve towards my jaw.

  ‘Do you know why you were crying?’ she said, trying to sound soft, empathetic, but not quite carrying it off.

  I just continued to stare at myself. It was like I was looking at a stranger. This moment in time, caught on a CCTV camera, meant nothing to me. I had no connection to it. It was a blank.

  ‘David? You don’t remember being there at all?’

  I swallowed again, and then again.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You said you only remember a little from yesterday?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Twelve o’clock through to 2 p.m., 3 p.m. at the very latest?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘What were you doing during that time?’

  ‘I told you, I was at home.’

  ‘Alone?’

  No. Not alone. I was with the woman you think I might have harmed.

  ‘Were you alone?’

  No. Yes. I don’t know.

  ‘David?’

  She was here. And for a second, I let myself believe it was Derryn.

  ‘I was alone,’ I said.

  Field’s eyes didn’t leave mine. ‘You told Dr Carson just now that you’ve never experienced such a long period of amnesia before.’

  I looked at her. Amnesia. That was the first time I’d thought about it in those terms. Amnesia. Memory loss. Chunks of time that were gone and might never come back. I’d worked a case where a man had lost everything in his life – every memory he’d ever held dear. I’d seen its devastating effects. But, at the time, I’d tried to approach it just like any other case. I’d sympathized, but I hadn’t truly understood.

  Now it was my life.

  ‘Were you being straight with us about that?’ Field asked. ‘About this being the first time you’ve suffered memory loss?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kent started writing something new down.

  ‘I wouldn’t have hurt anyone.’

  They were both silent.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ I said, but the words didn’t sound convincing this time, even to me. Conscious, coherent, there was no way I would go out to injure someone; not deliberately, cold-bloodedly, with intent. But that was just the problem: yesterday, I hadn’t been conscious or coherent. I wasn’t sure what I’d been.

  ‘Have you got the death certificate?’ Kent asked. His eyes skirted the room and then drifted along the hallway. ‘You told DS Field you had a copy of it in the loft. Have you had a chance to get that?’

  Shit.

  ‘David?’ Field pressed.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had time.’

  ‘You haven’t had time?’ Kent repeated, contempt in his voice. It was even worse than when they’d come to the house two days ago, because then I could actually get away with the idea that I hadn’t had time to go through the loft. Now it sounded exactly as hollow an excuse as it was. The truth was, I hadn’t had much time – not between their first visit, seeing McMillan, and the blackout – but I’d had enough. One of the key pieces of evidence, one of the things that could instantly shift suspicion away from me, and I’d failed to even look for it. It seemed to change the dynamic in the room: Kent snapped his notebook closed and Field’s face set hard, like concrete, her arms crossing in front of her.

  ‘Would you let us search your loft for you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘You said that the last time we were here.’

  ‘I mean it this time.’

  ‘And you didn’t last time?’

  ‘There’s been so much going on …’

  My words tailed off, flimsy, unconvincing, even though there was some truth in them.

  ‘So you’re not giving us permission?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  What other choice did I have? It was only a temporary fix: if they really wanted to find proof that I didn’t have the death certificate any more, they’d just go out, get a court order and come back. My hope was that Field would wait, though: according to her, in twenty-four hours’ time, the registrar at Ealing was due to return from holiday, and had promised to get her a copy of the certificate as soon as possible. I just had to stall things until then.

  But it didn’t help much in the here and now. Field was unemotional, stoic, but I knew enough about her, had seen enough of her, to know that she was pissed off. Kent was less adept at hiding his feelings: he looked like he wanted to get me by the throat and choke me out until he got to the truth. Again, I didn’t blame him. I was either sick, or I was a pathological liar, or I was both.

  But whatever I was, my story didn’t add up.

  Field said, ‘You know how these things work by now, David,’ and those grey eyes fixed on me, a hawk tracking its prey. ‘Because of that, I’m going to spare you the official version. At this precise moment, we don’t have enough evidence to arrest you, but it’s a matter of time. Hours. You’d make your life a lot easier if you were honest with us. Are you responsible? Are these still just disappearances?’

  The insinuation was transparent.

  Or are they something worse now?

  ‘I don’t know where either of them is,’ I said, and this time there was conviction in my voice. ‘You think I don’t want to know? If I knew where they were, I could stop this nightmare dead.’

  Field responded like she hadn’t even heard me: ‘What we do know, and what we can say with a degree of certainty, is that you were one of the last people to see the woman, who claims to be your wife, alive – because you followed her to that flat – and, last night, you were waiting outside the gates of St Augustine’s hospital in the minutes before Erik McMillan finished work.’

  I turned to the picture again.

  And then a thought occurred to me.

  ‘So where’s the image of him?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Have you actually got CCTV footage of McMillan leaving through the front gate? Have you got a picture of me confronting him?’ If they did, if they had footage of us together, why weren’t they showing me that? That would have been even more problematic because it would confirm their suspicions about me. Instead they were using this photograph: me, on the floor outside the hospital, alone.

  With no sign of McMillan.

  ‘There isn’t any footage, is there?’

  Kent had reverted to the same stance, opening and closing his right hand. He glanced at Field and then at me, looking unsure whether to step in or not. But I ignored them both, my thoughts already skipping ahead: if McMillan had popped into work, as he’d told them he had, as the data on his security card had confirmed, then he must have exited via the main
gate because that was the only way in and out of the hospital. And if I was there waiting for him before his 7 p.m. departure, why wasn’t there footage of that? Whether he was in a car, or on foot heading to the train station, there should have been video of me confronting him. That should have been the evidence the police needed to really turn the screw on me. But Field had already told me they didn’t have enough evidence for them to place me under arrest.

  They couldn’t put McMillan and me together.

  It was a chink of light.

  ‘His security card says he left St Augustine’s at 7 p.m.?’ I asked.

  ‘I already told you that.’

  ‘So you’re relying on what the card says?’

  Field’s eyes narrowed. ‘As opposed to what?’

  ‘As opposed to what you can see with your own eyes.’

  ‘I can see plenty with my own eyes, David.’

  ‘Here’s what I think,’ I said, ignoring the jibe. ‘I think McMillan has fiddled the system somehow. He’s made it look like he left the hospital at 7 p.m. when he didn’t –’

  ‘David.’

  ‘– leave at that time at all. Can’t you see this is a set-up? It’s all a set-up. There’s only one way in and out of that place and if McMillan didn’t take his car, he walked – and if he was walking, you should have him on film. You should have had us togeth–’

  ‘David, stop.’

  ‘Have you got footage of McMillan leaving the hospital?’ I asked.

  Silence.

  ‘Have you or haven’t you, just tell me that?’

  And then I saw it again, that same look in Field’s face as before, as if she was trying to tell me something: I wasn’t sure how I was reading her, why she would even let me do it, but I could see it. It was in her eyes. She was telling me, No, we don’t have footage of you and McMillan together. Or maybe this was some deliberate act. Maybe she wasn’t tipping me off, but laying a trap.

  ‘It’s time we were going,’ she said, standing.

  I carried on watching her, looking for any further clues that I was right, that she had been communicating with me, but her face was a mask again, fixed and unreadable. I couldn’t, for a second, imagine why she would help me, which made me even more dubious about her intentions.

  She pushed the photograph across the living-room table and said, ‘Keep this. See if it jogs your memory. I’ll talk to Dr Carson about any steps we might need to take from here, based on your assessment, but it goes without saying that, if you did happen to recall anything about last night, it would be helpful. It would be helpful for us and it would certainly be helpful for you.’ She let her silence press home the point. Then, more ambiguously, she said, ‘Someone is lying to me, David.’

  Two hours later, I found out who.

  #0717

  I’ve never told anyone this, Derryn, but, when I was young, I used to get into trouble a lot. I don’t think I was naughty necessarily, although I’m sure there were times when I was, it was more that I was just different from the other kids. I didn’t like the things they liked. At school, when they went off at lunchtimes to play football, I never went with them. At weekends, when they caught the bus into town, or went to each other’s houses to talk about girls, I never joined them. It wasn’t that I was antisocial, it was just I didn’t feel the same way they did. The things they thought were important, I considered dull. The things they talked about, laughed about, worried about – they all seemed incredibly trivial to me.

  I expect psychologists and doctors would look back at my childhood, at my lack of friends, at my decision not to join in, and say it was a consequence of something. I don’t mean any offence, Derryn, but with doctors, with medical people, everything has to be rationalized and categorized. They’d probably look at me and put it down to the way my father spoke to my mother and me, the way he would sometimes grab her by the arm when they argued, his teeth gritted, and squeeze until she backed down. He would hit me sometimes, on the backside mostly – but a few times he hit me in the face. With my father, it tended not to be the things that he did, but the things that he said.

  He could be cruel.

  After what happened at the hospital with you, I thought of my father for the first time in years. I spent the next couple of days trying to figure out how I might have upset you by giving you the copy of No One Can See the Crows at Night, but then I started to get frustrated instead. That was how it always started with my father. Frustration. Because, the thing is, you didn’t seem as happy as you should have been when I gave you the gift. You didn’t seem to appreciate it, or the note I’d written for you inside the book. You didn’t seem to realize how rare that edition was or how difficult it was to get hold of.

  So, a week later, I decided to return to your ward, just so we could clear the air. I wanted the chance to go to dinner with you, to share an evening with you. I didn’t want you to know me only as a patient, as someone sick who was admitted into your care, and then treated, and then discharged.

  I wanted to be more than that.

  I wanted to see you for another reason too: I didn’t want my frustration to turn to enmity, or even worse to bitterness.

  I didn’t ever want to become my father.

  39

  An hour after Field and Kent left, a courier arrived with a package.

  I signed for it, closed the door, and hurriedly tore along the top of the padded envelope. Inside were a slim USB stick, unmarked, and a piece of paper. Feeling a shot of adrenalin – my body starting to come alive, my thoughts instantly clear – I put the USB stick into my laptop. It contained four movie files.

  It was the CCTV footage from Ewan Tasker.

  I’d asked him to source two batches of surveillance tape for me. I’d wanted to try and ID the person who’d made the call from the payphone on the corner of Cavanagh Avenue in Plumstead, but I realized almost immediately that it wasn’t going to be possible. The folded piece of paper inside the envelope had a message on it: Re: Plumstead, no working camera close enough. Maybe that was exactly why the person who’d called McMillan had chosen it. Identifying them was going to be hard now, but I still wanted to get a sense of the phone box, the location and why it might have been chosen, and – with or without the footage – the best way of doing that was by physically going there myself.

  The other footage I’d asked for was from 2 Sovereign House in Chalk Farm on the night I’d followed the woman to the flat on the fifth floor. Field had said the blood on the door frame wasn’t mine and had seemed to suggest it belonged to the woman. In turn, it seemed likely it had ended up there when she’d been taken – in Kent’s words – against her will. If that really was true, I wanted to know who was responsible.

  The footage was split into four-hour chunks covering the time period I’d asked for: 4 p.m. on Thursday 28 December through to 8 a.m. on Friday the 29th. The camera was situated opposite the stairwell for 2 Sovereign House. In the foreground, I could see cars parked up, a few empty spaces, and the play park with the roundabout; in the background, to the left of the block of flats, were indecipherable lights from the city. I could see some of the first-floor walkway and about ten doors, and the same on the second floor. Despite the camera being elevated, possibly attached to the side of an adjacent building, that was as much of a view of the flats as I had.

  It would do: whatever happened, the woman had to come down the stairwell, and she had to exit in front of the camera. All I needed was one clear shot.

  At 4 p.m., the place was quiet, populated mostly by young kids at the park, and teenagers walking home from school. I used the cursor to propel the footage on, going through it at 2x speed and then 4x. Even before the footage had really started, it was obvious that the sun had begun to set, but, over the course of the next hour, the light completely altered, the palette becoming black, white and grey.

  The woman had arrived at the flat at around 7.25 p.m., so I kept fast-forwarding through the footage until I got to 6.30 p.m. Before that, there was l
ittle of any real interest: younger kids drifted back inside once it became fully dark, people started to arrive home from work, and then older kids began to emerge from hibernation, gathering in the folds and clefts of the building.

  Just after 6.30, I noticed someone else.

  He came in at the left-hand side of the frame, from the direction of the Tube, and was wearing a long raincoat, its colour hard to pin down in the gloom. To start with, I couldn’t place him, even though he seemed familiar: thirties, black hair, his skin pale under the glare of the street lamps, five ten maybe, stocky. It looked like he had a suit on, and had come straight from work; certainly his shoes looked smart – black, highly polished or brand new. He appeared for only a matter of seconds, and then he was gone again, swallowed by the stairwell as it corkscrewed around on itself.

  I replayed the footage. This time I slowed it all the way down, using the cursors to inch through frame by frame. When the man came into the shot, he was briefly side-on to me before his body turned ninety degrees and he headed in the direction of the stairwell. I played it once, still couldn’t ID him, and then played it a second time. This time, it clicked.

  Gavin.

  The guy from the rental agency.

  I grabbed my pad and went back through my notes. I’d spoken to him the morning after talking to Adam Reinsart, the owner of the flat. I’d been trying to figure out why someone would have been using the property, and how they’d gained access to it, when it was supposed to have been unoccupied until 6 January.

  Gavin’s second name was Roddat: he hadn’t offered it, I’d got it from the Hammond’s website. That was where I’d seen his picture too, and why it had taken a moment for his face to register with me. I’d never actually met him, only talked to him over the phone. I looked at the transcript I’d written up of our short phone conversation, where I’d pretended to be from the Met:

  There’s definitely no one living in the flat?

  No, not until the 6th of January.

  Because we’ve got witnesses that say there is.

  At this point, I’d written: Pause/didn’t reply.