You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  ‘No. I think her name’s Carly, though.’

  There was a hint of something else in her expression.

  ‘Louise?’

  ‘I say “I think” because he tends to just call her “the bitch”,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t think they separated on good terms.’ She turned, as if she could sense that she was being watched by her boss – which she was. A smartly dressed black guy was getting up from the desk, eyes fixed on us. ‘He’s always calling her a “bitch”,’ Louise went on, her voice dialled down, clearly relishing the opportunity to tell me what she knew about Roddat. For the first time, I noticed she was the only female employee here, which made me think this wasn’t just her gossiping; it was a culmination of weeks, months, perhaps years of having to listen to Roddat and the rest of the men she worked with. ‘He’s really cruel about her – but, you know, you reap what you sow.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She looked again at her boss, saw he was coming towards us now and talked fast: ‘Gavin’s an arsehole when it comes to women. From what I hear, he’s been screwing around for years. I don’t blame his wife for calling it a day. In fact, I’m surprised the marriage even lasted five years.’

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Fine, thank you,’ I said to the branch manager, snapping my notebook shut.

  ‘Are you from the police too?’ he asked.

  ‘I was following up on some things my colleagues asked this morning,’ I said by way of an answer, and then thanked them both and quickly headed out.

  On the way to the Tube, I tried to locate Roddat’s ex-wife. If they were divorced, it was likely she wasn’t using his surname any more. But, as it turned out, I got lucky: next to an address in Stalybridge, I found a C. Roddat in the telephone directory. A woman answered after a couple of rings: ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is that Carly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Carly, my name’s David Raker. I’m an investigator from London. There’s no need to worry about anything, but I need to get in touch with your ex-husband about a case involving a property that he looks after, and unfortunately I can’t locate him.’

  ‘I don’t know why you think I can help.’

  ‘You haven’t seen him lately?’

  ‘I still live in Manchester. He moved down to London after we separated. The last time I saw Gav was in July, and we both had our solicitors with us at the time.’

  ‘So he hasn’t been in touch?’

  She gave a little grunt. ‘No. And I wouldn’t expect him to be, not after all the shit he pulled during our marriage. If you can even call it a bloody marriage. I wouldn’t go within a thousand miles of that bastard if he was the last man on Earth.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, trying to keep her on point. ‘So, have you got any idea where I might find him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has he got any family down here?’

  ‘Daniel,’ she said quickly.

  ‘Who’s Daniel?’

  ‘He’s, like, a third or fourth cousin or something, but they grew up next door to each other, so they’ve always been close. Sometimes Gav used to go down to London to housesit when Daniel was away with work; he’s got some job where he’s out in Asia a lot. Anyway, housesit is a pretty liberal interpretation of what I imagine Gav got up to when he went down there. Mostly I think he used it as a place to get his end away.’

  I took down Daniel’s name and address.

  ‘Has anyone else been in touch about Gavin?’ I asked.

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Anyone else from the police?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  Hanging up, I tried calling Roddat on his mobile again, but I killed the call as soon as it went to voicemail. Next, I tried his cousin’s landline. There was no response there either. That didn’t discount the idea that Roddat was lying low there – in fact, it didn’t mean he wasn’t there at this precise moment – but if he was, I wondered what the best strategy would be. Should I watch? Scope him out?

  Or should I just doorstep him and go on the attack?

  If I was planning to do that, it was best not to do it in broad daylight, with neighbours and passers-by milling around, able to give a full account of what they were seeing and hearing, so I inverted my plans: at some stage after this, I’d intended to go to Plumstead and take a look at the phone box McMillan had been called from, and the area surrounding it. Instead, I’d go there first and then come back up to Camden Town – where the cousin’s place was – as soon as it was dark. Cover of night wasn’t the only reason for doing it this way round: it was New Year’s Eve, so the longer I waited, the more partying there would be, and the easier it would be to go unnoticed.

  Back on the Tube, I thought again about Gavin Roddat. I seriously doubted that he was sick, but alarm bells were definitely ringing, otherwise why go to ground? The weird thing was, though, as much as I knew I now had a lead that the police didn’t – the location of his cousin’s place – and, in turn, a potential way of locating him, something didn’t feel right. I had zero sense of achievement, just a low-level dread humming in my blood.

  And I knew why.

  This was heading somewhere bad.

  #0722

  At the ward, I waited outside the security doors for you.

  I had a takeaway coffee and a notebook with me that I used for work. It was full of names and addresses: people I had to visit as part of my job. On a fresh page, I wrote down the things I wanted to say to you. I know it seems stupid. I just wanted to get things right in my head before I said them out loud to you, because I knew I might only get one shot at this. I didn’t think you were the type of woman who’d punish a man for being inelegant with words, but, at the same time, if I stood there in front of you and didn’t articulate myself properly, if I seemed uncertain or garbled my words, that wasn’t likely to help me very much.

  This time, though, you never appeared.

  Not in the morning, not in the afternoon either. I thought about going on to the ward, nipping in after someone had been buzzed in or out, but the nurses there were clever. They’d have worked out that I wasn’t a patient any longer, and I didn’t want to create a scene, or embarrass you at work.

  So I came back the next day, and waited some more.

  Eventually, on the third day of hanging around, I caught one of the nurses as he left and asked if you were on holiday. I recognized him from when I’d been on the ward, and I think he recognized me. His name was Alejandro and – the day after I’d been admitted with that skull fracture – I heard him telling the guy in the bed next to mine that he was from the south of Spain. I didn’t really like Alejandro back then – he had this superior attitude, this way of looking down his nose at you, which really annoyed me – and I didn’t much like the way he looked at me now. You remember how I said once before that some people don’t smile from their eyes? He was one of those.

  ‘Is Derryn on holiday?’ I asked.

  He frowned. ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Where is she then?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘what was your name again?’

  ‘Is she in work or not?’

  ‘I can’t give that information out.’

  I could see him starting to get suspicious, looking at me like I’d committed some crime in asking about where you were, so I told him I was just a friend of yours – which wasn’t a lie – and immediately left. By the time I got to my car, I felt annoyed. Why were you taking so much time off? How was I going to get hold of you? How was I going to tell you about how rare the book was?

  How would we ever get to spend an evening together?

  I slid in behind the wheel and tried to take some deep breaths. I thought of my father again, of how I never wanted to become like him, and then looked out of the windscreen at the building where you’d taken care of me for those few, wonderful days. And a couple of minutes later, feeling calmer and more rational, I made a decision.

  It seemed so obvious.

&n
bsp; I’d just find out where you lived instead.

  42

  It took over an hour to get to Plumstead, and another fifteen minutes to find my way to Cavanagh Avenue. By the time I arrived, the sun was starting to disappear behind rooftops to the west of the Common.

  The payphone was on one side of the road, overshadowed by a huge oak tree in someone’s garden, and on the other was the bank of shops and businesses I’d seen online when I’d been using Street View: the grocery store-cum-off licence, the Polish deli, the Bangladeshi takeaway and the newsagent.

  I crossed the road to the payphone, briefly looked it over, and then checked up and down the street. Ewan Tasker was right: there were no cameras trained in the phone box’s direction. There were cameras – I could see at least two, one mounted to the front of the grocery store, and the other on a pub about five hundred feet away – but they’d been adjusted so that their focus was on the building entrances, not on the Common Road itself – and certainly not on Cavanagh Avenue.

  So what now?

  I looked around me and saw a woman walking a dog in the park. She was studying her phone. She bore little resemblance to the woman who’d pretended to be Derryn, except perhaps in her hair colour, but the vague similarities in her height and weight, in her age, made me think of her. It made me wonder where she’d gone after that night at the flat in Chalk Farm. Where had Roddat taken her? Could they be up north? Or was he keeping her at his cousin’s place? A part of me wondered whether it had been a mistake to come here and not go to Camden Town instead, but the idea that Roddat would take her somewhere so obvious – or, at least, somewhere he could be tracked to without too much trouble – didn’t feel right.

  Grabbing my phone, I brought up a picture of Roddat and headed to the first of the businesses, the grocery store. It was run by a Pakistani guy in his fifties. I showed him the photo and asked if he recognized Roddat. He said he didn’t. I then showed him the picture of the woman that had been used on FeedMe. He leaned in, taking the phone from me as if he needed to have a closer look, as if he wasn’t sure – and, briefly, I allowed myself a moment of hope. But then he shook his head, gave me the phone back and any hope fizzled out.

  I moved on to the deli, then the takeaway, then the newsagent, and then away from the Common and towards the pub. It was packed inside, New Year celebrations already kicking off. Music blared from a jukebox in the corner, people were laughing, some were in party dresses, clearly using the pub as a stopping-off point on the way to somewhere else. It gave me a lot more potential leads, but ultimately it came to nothing. No one recognized the woman from her photo, and no one had seen Gavin Roddat around either.

  I headed back to the payphone.

  If someone had used this phone, they hadn’t just done it because there was no way to trace them, or no surveillance cameras close by to put them here at the time of the call. They’d done it because it was convenient. It surely had to be local to them, or local to where they worked, or close to the social circles they existed in, otherwise why use this particular phone? It made me wonder if Roddat had other family members in the city, not just his cousin in Camden Town – people he may have spent the Christmas break with, which would explain why he was down this way in the first place. Or was the truth simply that Roddat never called McMillan three days ago?

  Was it someone else entirely?

  I watched the lady in the park with her dog again, her phone still in her hands, moving away from me, between the skeletal trees that bordered the Common, and then I headed back in the direction of the station. There was nothing for me here. Whoever had made the call from the payphone had made it knowing they’d have complete anonymity.

  No cameras.

  No witnesses who might remember anything.

  And then I stopped again. Fifteen feet ahead of me, where the Common jagged around a row of tired-looking terraced houses, most of them converted into flats, I spotted another business. This one was different from the others I’d just been into: its sign was above a doorway that was marked 13B, and it looked like it might once have been residential – a second-floor flat that was no longer being lived in.

  It had been converted into a community library.

  I moved towards it, a CLOSED sign under the number, its opening hours listed on a piece of laminated plastic to the left: 11 p.m. to 4 p.m. every day except Christmas Day. But that wasn’t what had got my interest.

  It was its name.

  Immediately, I rewound back two days, to what I’d found when I’d been hunting around the loft for a copy of Derryn’s death certificate: the edition of No One Can See the Crows at Night with a message inside.

  Derryn: Thank you for our special time together x.

  On the first page, there had been a stamp: PCCL.

  I hadn’t understood what the stamp had meant back then, hadn’t even known if it was relevant. But it was. It stood for Plumstead Common Community Library.

  This was where the book had come from.

  I looked around me, back along the road towards the payphone. It was hard to think clearly, but harder still to believe this might just be some huge coincidence. I’d found the book, and the message tucked inside, after turning the loft inside out. I might never have found the message, ever, if the death certificate hadn’t been missing, but the death certificate was missing, the message was inside the book – and Derryn had relegated it, and the person who’d given her the novel, to the attic.

  Could it have been Roddat who had given it to her?

  One thing was for sure: everything linked together too well now. There was no way the payphone that McMillan was called from just happened to be metres away from the library in which a book had been loaned, or bought, for Derryn. Not in a case like this.

  Not when someone was pretending to be her.

  I looked at my watch, at the sky – a charcoal smear – and thought about my next move. But there was really only one move to make: even if I’d wanted to go into the library, I couldn’t. It was already shut.

  So that just left Gavin Roddat.

  If I found him, I found the woman.

  43

  Roddat’s cousin lived in the middle of a three-storey terrace, about a minute’s walk from Regent’s Canal. The houses on both sides were smart and the street was lined with expensive cars. It was obvious why Roddat might offer to housesit and why he’d prefer to bring women here rather than to the less auspicious surroundings of his house in Tottenham.

  I walked up and down the street, partly to get a sense of the road, but mostly because I was on the lookout for more police. I’d spent an hour in Plumstead, and over two hours going there and getting here, so there was every chance they’d used the time to connect Roddat to his cousin and his cousin to here.

  But if they were watching, they were well hidden.

  There were no vehicles in the road that I would have immediately identified as unmarked cars; certainly no cars with people sitting inside them. I walked to one end of the street and into a connecting road, double-checking there too, then came back and did the same on the opposite side. I checked the windows of the houses as well, even though I was pretty certain the Met wouldn’t be camped out in someone’s home yet. Sometimes it came to that, but this case wasn’t quite at that stage. Even so, as I returned to the house, I still felt on edge.

  There were no lights on inside, though it was dark now, and the only things I could see through the semi-opaque ground-floor window were an extravagant wreath hanging from the living-room door close by, and a tall, decorated fir tree – almost as high as the ceiling – next to a fireplace off to the left. All its lights were off. The cousin must have been at home before Christmas at some point, but it didn’t necessarily mean he was around at the moment. In fact, if it turned out Roddat had actually come here, if he was using this place to lie low in, it was probably likely he was doing it because his cousin wasn’t home, and wasn’t due back for a while.

  I rang the doorbell.

 
As I waited, I checked the road again. It was almost six o’clock and – just like in Plumstead – the New Year’s Eve celebrations had begun. Nine doors along, I overheard a man talking on a mobile about a dinner party; in the other direction, I could hear music, the dull thud of a bassline; across from me, a group of four women were in a doorway, smoking and laughing.

  I tried the doorbell again.

  As I waited, I checked the houses either side of me: on the right, in an identical garden to this one, a wicker reindeer had fallen over; to the left, I could see through the window to where an old couple – their backs to me – had just finished setting a table for dinner. There were two places, one for each of them. They had a gas fire going, its flames casting a warm glow, and the man had now taken his wife by the hand and was beginning to waltz her towards the kitchen.

  They erupted into laughter.

  I thought of my own parents then, who’d still laughed with one another, even after years together, and felt a flutter of sadness as I remembered how long it had been since they’d died. I felt it again as I thought of Derryn, except it hurt even more. In moments like this, in the fractional glimpses of a life we could have had, it always hit me how much I missed her. And it hit me even harder now as I dealt with the fallout from four days of lies, as the grief I’d buried, and made some sort of peace with, was exhumed.

  Further down the street, there was another eruption of laughter from the women gathered outside having a smoke, a shrill noise that brought me crashing back to the present. I looked from them to the door I was standing in front of, and – ignoring the doorbell completely – knocked hard.

  This time, I heard something.

  A click.

  It took me a second to work out what had happened, the lack of light from the inside of the house not helping. I stepped closer, checking the shadows around the door – and then I understood.

  The front door had shifted.

  It was already open.

  44

  With the sleeve of my jacket, I pushed at the door and watched it swing back into the shadows of the house. There was some peripheral light ahead of me, but not much.