You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  Gavin?

  There shouldn’t be. Here at Hammond’s, we pride ourselves on –

  Would anyone else there know anything?

  No. I handle that property.

  Was it possible he was looking after another flat at Sovereign House? Maybe it was, but it seemed like a coincidence, and my eyes kept returning to that middle section of the transcript. Pause/didn’t reply. Had he been silent because he was thrown by what I’d told him – or because he was trying to think on his feet?

  I thought of what Field had said to me.

  Someone is lying to me, David.

  Did she mean Gavin Roddat?

  Had he gone to unlock the flat? Had he gone there to wait for the woman? I couldn’t see any keys on him, but even if he’d been holding some, it would have been hard to make them out, given the low-quality light and the high angle of the camera. As the footage continued to play, I looked down at the transcript again, thinking about how Field might be approaching this. It seemed hugely unlikely that she wouldn’t have already watched this same piece of footage, and so she’d have seen Gavin Roddat enter the stairwell not long before the woman arrived. Whether that meant anything to her depended on whether she’d phoned Adam Reinsart, got hold of the name of his rental agency, and, like me, called Hammond’s and found out that Roddat was looking after the flat.

  I had to assume that she had. She was smart and organized. She wouldn’t have missed something like this, wouldn’t have overlooked a line of enquiry so obvious. So it was safe to assume that she knew what Roddat’s connection to the property was. It was safe to assume she’d ID’d him on the video. So where had she gone from there? Had she been to see him? Had she brought him in for questioning?

  Someone is lying to me, David.

  I wondered, for a second, if this meant that Roddat was already in custody. Was he lying to her from the inside of an interview room?

  The video rolled on, past 7 p.m., a few people coming and going but no one I recognized or who gave me pause. I kept trying to retrofit Gavin into what I’d found out in the case so far, making notes while watching the film, but I couldn’t see the links. I couldn’t connect him to McMillan – or to the little of what I knew of the woman.

  For the next hour, the scene at the flat was quiet.

  But then, at 7.26 p.m., the woman finally arrived.

  40

  She was holding the Post-it note between her thumb and finger, just as I remembered her doing, and as she came to a brief stop beside the play park, the roundabout turning gently in the breeze, she used a tissue to wipe her nose. She did it once, and then again, and then she looked at the Post-it note and did it a third time. As I watched her, I thought of her in my house, sitting on the edge of the mattress, the tears rolling down her cheeks.

  She started moving again.

  A few tentative steps, as if she wasn’t sure what was coming – or maybe the total opposite. Maybe she did know. Maybe she’d met Roddat before. Maybe she was frightened of him. As if on cue, she looked up, out beyond the very top of the frame, following Sovereign House into the night sky as it rose five floors. She stayed like that for a moment, a hesitation in her movement, and then I saw her shoulders rise – as if she was taking a long, deep breath – and she headed in the direction of the stairwell.

  About twenty seconds after she disappeared from view, I saw myself. There wasn’t much of me – the back of my head and neck, part of my cheek, the top of my shoulders – but it was me. Field would have seen this too: the confirmation that I’d been there that night, but also that I hadn’t followed the woman up to the flat, just as I’d stated. On the video, I stood on the other side of the play park and looked up.

  I couldn’t see what was happening on the fifth floor using the footage, but I remembered what I’d seen when I was there. She’d moved along the walkway towards the penultimate door – wiping her nose with the tissue again – and then she’d stopped, pausing there for a moment, looking down at the Post-it note. Then, finally, she’d placed a hand flat to the door, as if knowing already that it would be unlatched, and pushed. Once it had opened fully, she’d stepped inside, swallowed up by the darkness of the flat, and another small detail came back to me: the door hadn’t closed again – not immediately.

  It had stayed open.

  That night, I hadn’t lingered for long, and as I’d tailed her to the flat, I’d kept my distance the entire time. But, sometime later on in the evening, she’d called the police, given them the address of the flat in Chalk Farm, and told them I’d followed her there. I’d never been able to figure out how she’d spotted me. She hadn’t said why she’d been at the flat, she’d never mentioned it in the interview with Field, and there was nothing connecting her to the property. But, when she’d made the call, she’d sounded distressed – so distressed that Kent had driven out to Sovereign House to check on her. By that time, she was gone, but it was enough to sow seeds of doubt about me in Field and Kent’s investigation. They thought I was the reason she’d been so distressed. But what if it wasn’t?

  What if the woman hadn’t seen me tailing her at all?

  I’d shadowed a lot of people and had become good at it. I’d done it so many times, on so many cases, I felt certain I’d have known if I was compromised. That night, I didn’t remember the woman looking back once in all the time I tailed her from Charing Cross – yet, somehow, she was able to tell police I was there.

  Because it wasn’t her that saw me that night.

  It was Gavin Roddat.

  I looked at myself in the bottom corner of the screen, lingering for a few seconds after the woman had entered the flat. I thought of how the door had remained open briefly afterwards, the dark of the flat showing out at me. What if Roddat had been just inside the door? What if he’d looked out and spotted me five floors below?

  I let the video run, watching the timecode tick over. It was 7.29 now. Field said the woman had called them on a prepaid mobile an hour after leaving Charing Cross station: the walk from the police station to the Tube was about five minutes; the train journey on the Northern Line about fifteen; and the walk from Chalk Farm station to the flats no more than ten. Thirty minutes: that meant she’d made the call to Field – or rather Kent, as Field had already gone home by then – at around 8 p.m. So did she make the call from the flat? Did that mean the prepaid mobile belonged to Roddat? What did they do there for half an hour before she called Kent?

  I sped up the footage, stopping at 8 p.m., thinking that she may have exited the flat immediately after the phone call. Nothing happened. More people came and went – a young couple; an old woman, slow, limping, being helped by what must have been her son – but no one I recognized; cars pulled into the parking spaces; teenagers began to drift out of shot. After that, the only thing that moved were the swings and the roundabout in the play park. I fast-forwarded it again at 2x speed, trying to catch sight of the two of them coming out of the stairwell. Still nothing. It was after 8.30 now, sixty minutes since she’d entered the flat, thirty since the phone call. By this time, Kent would have been well on his way – probably, depending on traffic, only a couple of minutes out.

  Then, finally, she appeared again.

  I hit Pause on the footage as she emerged from the stairwell into the glare of the street lights. She looked exactly the same as when she’d gone in, except she seemed to have recovered some of her composure. But then I started the video again, and – in motion – I began to realize it wasn’t that at all. I thought I’d seen something positive and assured when I’d looked at her frozen image, but as the footage began to play again, as she started walking, I saw that her movements were slightly off, as if she was agitated or hurt. What I’d seen as poise was actually the opposite. Her face was empty, her eyes dead. She wasn’t composed. She was stunned.

  What was wrong with her?

  She took another step forward and then I could see him. In the space directly behind her, almost hiding from view. Roddat had pulled the coll
ar up on his raincoat so that it covered the sides of his face, some of the front too, and because of the shadows, there was only a minimal amount of face showing: an eye, a mouth, half a nose. I couldn’t see his hair now either because he was wearing a black beanie.

  Alarm blared inside me as I watched him guide her out into the evening. There was a mark on her cheek, one on her neck too. I thought they had been shadows to start with, but as she came further forward, she altered position and, even with the quality of the CCTV film, I could make them out under the glare of the street lamp. The one on her neck looked like a bruise, but the one on her cheek was a cut. It was fresh and it was spreading, black lines escaping from it.

  It must have been how the blood had ended up on the door frame.

  Shortly after that, they were gone.

  I rewound the footage, starting it again at the point they appeared. This time I went through it frame by frame, taking screenshots of the moments when Roddat wasn’t entirely hidden behind her. There weren’t many. After I was done, I rolled the footage on and began going through the screenshots: three, maybe four usable shots, and even those weren’t great. But they were enough. I could see it was Roddat; Field would have been able to see it too.

  Now she had a suspect that wasn’t me.

  Onscreen, six minutes later, a car pulled in: Field and Kent’s Volvo. Kent got out quickly, slammed the door shut, didn’t even bother locking the car, and hurried to the stairwell. The call from the woman must have been bad – bad enough to have got this reaction from him. It made me wonder what she’d said, but mostly it made me wonder what Roddat had done to her; why she had blood on her face. Where would he have taken her from here?

  He must have known that, over the days that followed, the police would be looking at the footage; and even if he’d gone to the trouble of – at least, partly – disguising himself on the way down with the beanie, he hadn’t bothered on the way up, so he would have guessed the police would ID him pretty quickly. Maybe all he’d needed was time: by temporarily shifting the blame on to me, by getting the woman to speak to Field and Kent and tell them that I’d followed her from Charing Cross that night, Roddat would create enough breathing space to do whatever it was he needed to do. Get the woman somewhere. Hide her. Make sure she wasn’t found.

  As I processed that, I started to wonder if Roddat might also have been the person who’d made the call to McMillan from the payphone in Plumstead just before I’d walked into the police station at Charing Cross. What had he said? Had it been a call to warn McMillan what was happening? Was that when the two of them had come up with a plan to corner me, frame me, hurt me? I had no idea how I’d got home from St Augustine’s, I didn’t know how the woman had ended up at my house, or disappeared again, or how I’d ended up back at the hospital, but to Field and Kent, even to myself, by not being able to see those answers coherently, I looked like a man on the brink of collapse: the sort of man who might think he saw a heart drawn on to a window, or a face in an alley when there was nothing there; the sort of man who couldn’t account for great swathes of time. And all of that played into the same story that the woman had started, that McMillan had continued, and now – it seemed – Roddat was set to carry on: that in telling the world Derryn was dead, I’d been lying.

  But why target me at all?

  And there was something else that didn’t make sense: Roddat didn’t live anywhere close to Plumstead. It took one thirty-second Internet search for me to get an address for him – and it was near Tottenham Marshes, over ten miles away.

  I turned away from my laptop, trying to think, but all I could see now was the woman’s face. It was there, impossible to delete: in the shadows at the foot of the stairwell, Roddat behind her and then beside her, directing her out, away from the flats, her expression absolutely set, her gaze fixed and empty.

  As if she’d been hollowed out.

  It was an image that hit like a hammer. It took me back to all the times I’d been sitting alongside Derryn, my hand in hers, as cancer doctors delivered devastating news like they were reading off a menu. It took me back to the weeks and months afterwards, when her hair was gone and her body was going, and I would glance at her and see that same hollowed-out look and realize there was nothing I could do for her. There was nothing I could say. All I’d had then were words, and they stopped working the second she got sick.

  Again, I glanced at the screenshots I’d taken of the woman.

  They were hard to look at now. The expression on her face had got to me, had dug into my skin like nails. I couldn’t shake the image, even as I looked away: it was her eyes. They were absolutely empty. What the hell had he done to her in that flat?

  She’d turned my life inside out, she’d lied about who she was, she’d made me a suspect in the eyes of the Met, and I still didn’t know why she was doing it. But, in this moment, I found it hard to generate any anger for her. Something had shifted, the axis of the case had tilted, and – despite all the lies she’d told – I saw distinctly who she was in this moment. Not an instigator, or a mastermind. Not someone in control. Someone vulnerable and fragile.

  A pawn, just like me.

  Everything snapped into focus: to end this, I needed to find her. It was all that mattered. I needed to know why she’d pretended to be Derryn, how she knew so much about us, and how she fitted into this nightmare.

  I needed to find her for another reason too.

  Her face on the video was a cry for help. It was the face of someone mixed up in something they no longer had any control over, and – if I wanted to help her, and in turn help myself – there was only one place to start.

  I had to find out who Gavin Roddat really was.

  41

  Roddat lived in a plain two-up two-down terraced house in Tottenham, a mile south of the North Circular. There was a tiny square of paved-over front garden, empty except for a green wheelie bin and a white wooden bench.

  I rang the doorbell and looked around. The street was busy: families were milling about, kids were kicking a ball against a wall further down, and a man was washing his car. Closer, a few doors away, an old couple were sitting on their garden wall, enjoying a coffee and the faint warmth of the winter sun. I had my picks with me, but it would have been insane to use them with so many eyes on me.

  I looked through the window in a vague attempt to see whether he was hiding inside, but the TV and all the lights were off, including those on a modest, two-foot high Christmas tree. Getting out my phone, I tried the mobile number listed under his name on the Hammond’s website. It went unanswered. Heading back down the path, I happened to look right, past the old couple, to a cul-de-sac halfway down. On the corner, only the front of it visible, was a grey Vectra.

  Two men were sitting inside.

  They were watching me.

  I walked back in the same direction I’d come, as if I hadn’t noticed them, but I knew who they were. Cops. If they were watching the house, it meant I was right: Field and Kent had seen the video of Roddat and the woman at the flat in Chalk Farm. They were on to him.

  And now they knew that I was too.

  It took me ten minutes to walk to the Overground station at South Tottenham and, during that time, I knew that the call would have been made to Field and Kent at Charing Cross about my visit here. So what would Field do? Try to head me off? Try to prevent me from interfering in their hunt for Gavin Roddat? Or would she sit back and wait, and see if I led her somewhere new?

  I got the train to Upper Holloway, and then walked from there to the bottom of Highgate Road. Hammond’s was at the end, near the beginning of Kentish Town Road. I wasn’t certain if I’d even find it open today, given it was New Year’s Eve, but I caught a break: the lights were on and people were milling about inside. It was more like a coffee shop than a place to buy a house, a mix of red-brick walls, black-and-white photographs and highly polished floors. All the desks were in a line at the back behind four red sofas, a coffee machine and a fridge full of b
ottled water.

  A woman in her twenties standing just inside the door, a clipboard in her hands, greeted me: ‘Good morning,’ she said, beaming. ‘Welcome to Hammond’s. I’m Louise.’

  ‘Hi, Louise. I’m looking for Gavin Roddat.’

  Her smile fell away.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, right.’

  She looked worried now, immediately on edge: someone from the Met had clearly been here asking about Roddat already. I looked over her shoulder, towards the back of the room. All four desks were occupied. Gavin Roddat wasn’t at any of them.

  ‘Has someone already been in asking about Gavin?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you from the police then?’

  ‘I’m working with the police,’ I replied. ‘I guess we got our wires crossed about who was coming here today.’ I smiled at her, attempting to put her at ease, and before she could quiz me any further, said, ‘So, to double-check: you told my colleague that Gavin isn’t in?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Is it his day off?’

  ‘No. He called in sick.’

  He’d called in sick, but he wasn’t at home.

  ‘He said he was ill?’

  She frowned. ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘It’s just, I spoke to him on the phone yesterday.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes, he seemed fine then. Is Gavin in trouble?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I said, pretending to consult my notes. ‘From our records, I see that Gavin lives in Tottenham. Do you know if he owns other properties in the city?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Has he got a girlfriend?’

  ‘No, he’s divorced.’

  ‘Do you know where his ex-wife lives?’

  ‘Uh …’ Louise paused. ‘Somewhere up north, I think.’

  Could he have gone there? He could have been hundreds of miles away already – and the woman could have been with him.

  ‘Do you know where exactly up north his ex-wife lives?’