by Tim Weaver
The hallway ran front to back, with a living room on one side and a kitchen on the other. From the living room, there was a leak of residual light through the front window, but not enough to show me more than the edge of a sofa and a square TV cabinet. At the end of the hallway, a glass door led out to a small garden. Solar-powered lights had been added to a couple of flower pots immediately outside the door, and now they were emitting a ghostly hue.
‘Gavin?’
Nothing from inside the house.
‘Gavin, it’s David Raker.’
I double-checked the street, studying windows, looking into cars that were parked along the side of the road. I still couldn’t see any eyes on me, not in the houses or in the vehicles, but neither of those things steadied my nerves. As I turned to the door again, it began inching back towards me, moaning on its hinges, and I noticed something else: the faint, very distant whine of a breeze carrying through the house.
‘Gavin?’
For a third time, all I was met with was silence.
I wiped my feet and pulled my sleeve down, covering my hands, conscious of leaving a trace of myself here. As soon as I stepped inside, I heard the wind again, felt it streaming past me like the fast flow of a river, drawn to the front door from somewhere else in the house: another open door at the back of the property, or a window in one of the other rooms. The moment I was inside, the carpet thick beneath my feet, I checked the front door to see why it had been open. A bunch of keys was hanging from the rear. Because the keys had been turned in the lock, the latch was off. I pulled the keys out, placed them on the side and closed the door properly. The sound of the breeze ceased.
‘Gavin?’
Removing my phone, I opted against using the torch function – it was too bright and too conspicuous if anyone was looking in from the outside – and opted for the duller glow of the home screen. It was enough. As I inched into the living room, everything came alive in sepia: two sofas, a table, the TV cabinet, some DVD box sets piled inside. It was small, but it had been done nicely: the furniture looked expensive, the television too, the wallpaper shone new. Left on one of the sofas was a Dell laptop in a slipcase.
I picked it up with the sleeves of my coat, unzipped the case and removed the laptop. As I left it to boot up, I went back out into the hallway and across to the kitchen, which looked out to the back garden. There was no shed, no storage of any kind; nowhere to hold someone. I checked the kitchen for anywhere that looked large enough to store a person the woman’s size, but again there was nothing.
Back in the living room, the laptop had brought up a password screen and a corporate logo. It was a work computer; his cousin evidently worked for a shipping company. I closed it and headed upstairs.
The moment I hit the landing, I could feel the air chill, breath forming in front of my face in a fine mist. There were three doors, forming an L-shape: a bathroom, a main bedroom and a spare room. I checked the bathroom over, found nothing, checked the main bedroom, then made my way to the last room.
The door had swung most of the way closed. Even before I reached it, I could feel the temperature alter again, the ice in the air. This room was at the back of the house, looking out over the garden. I knew, behind the door somewhere, I would find a window open, and it had nothing to do with the cold: I could hear traffic from Kentish Town Road; I could pick up the voices of the women I’d seen outside earlier; and I could hear the same music – its pulsing bassline – but even clearer, coming from this side of the terrace.
I shoved at the door.
It swung open, and a sudden rush of wind met me. My exposed skin prickled, my eyes watered: the room was like an ice box, the window wide open, pushed as far as it would go on its fixings.
He was in the space beside the desk.
His feet dangled a foot and a half off the floor as he hung next to the legs of the chair he’d used, his body somehow appearing smaller than it should have, as if it had collapsed in on itself, an inflatable that had lost its air. He seemed to have compressed and shrivelled, his hands half-formed fists, his trousers slipping away from his waist and legs. Every part of him had receded in death – every part, except one.
His head.
That was still upright, facing forward, his eyes wide and filled with blood, his neck rigidly held steady by the noose. The rope ran from his neck to a ceiling fixture, then looped down to the open window in an inverted V shape, where it was attached to one of the window fittings. There, it had been tied in a series of knots so it wouldn’t come loose after the chair had been kicked away beneath him.
I tore my eyes away from Gavin Roddat and took in the rest of the room. There was a desk with an iPad on it. A pot with some pencils and pens. A few sheets of paper – bills, correspondence – and another laptop. This one was already open, the power on, a video of some kind paused onscreen. A split second later, I realized what: the snow, the Alpine houses, a woman in the centre of the shot, looking back.
Nausea gripped me.
It was the home movie of Derryn in Austria.
I’d watched it three nights ago. I’d watched this whole section, from start to finish: Derryn walking through the snowdrifts in the town, towards the restaurant, talking over her shoulder at me, joking that she was going to have glühwein for every meal.
On the desk, beside the laptop, was a suicide note.
It only had two words on it.
I’m sorry
#0733
You lived in Ealing. I couldn’t find out much about you online, even though you had an unusual name. But you were in the phonebook, listed as D. Raker, so – after work one day – I took a drive out to where you lived, hoping that you might be at home.
You weren’t.
I wasn’t exactly sure what I was expecting, but I’ve got to admit that I found your home quite plain and unremarkable. It was a bungalow, which was unusual for London, but everything else was so staid. I thought, given that smile of yours, that little bit of mystery you had in your eyes, that I’d get to the house and find something unusual, out of the ordinary. But it was just another house, in another street, with the same finishes and flourishes, the same flowers at the front.
It was the middle of the day, and I didn’t want a neighbour to think I was snooping around, so I wandered on to the driveway and went straight to the front door. You didn’t have a doorbell. Instead, you had a timber door with a brass knocker. I tapped it twice and waited.
There was no answer.
From the front porch, I could see part of the way into the kitchen. You must have left in a hurry that morning, because there were bowls in the sink and a half-finished cup of coffee on the worktop. I leaned a little closer and my new angle gave me a view all the way across to a door on the right, into the hallway. Next to that was a fridge, things stuck to it: paper, magnets, a notepad.
Photographs.
The photographs were too far away to be certain of who was in them, but I thought I could make you out in one. I thought I could see that smile, even from where I was. In another, I wondered if you might have been with your parents because there were three people, and two of them looked like they had grey hair. It made me wonder about your family. Were your parents still alive? Did you get on with them? Did you have a brother or a sister?
I returned to your house twice over the following week.
The first time, I waited outside in my car, almost opposite the gates of the house, but – after four hours – you never came back. The second time, I woke in darkness and tried to get across London before you left for your shift at the hospital, but the house was already locked up by the time I arrived, and I started to wonder if you’d changed shifts in the time between my visits. Maybe you weren’t on the day rota any more; maybe you were working the night shift now.
I’ve lost count of the visits now, because there have been so many, but some I remember more than others. One time, at night, I scaled your side gate. I stood there, protected by the blackness, and looked ou
t at your simple little garden, and then peered in through the rear windows, into the living room and the main bedroom. Again, I’d expected the decor to be more unconventional, but the bedroom was all cream and grey and mauve, like a bland show house. Was this the limit of your imagination, Derryn? Was this really as far as it stretched? Almost immediately, I had to remind myself that successful relationships aren’t always built on similarities but on differences, and on being able to embrace those differences, and, in the grand scheme of things, knew that these were small niggles – but, even so, that day, for the first time since I’d started coming to your house, I felt that same sense of frustration building. I felt the echo of my father coming through again. I didn’t want to be sneaking around. I just wanted to talk. But you’re never at home, Derryn.
Why are you never at home?
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve got it into my head that you’re playing games with me. So is that what this is? A game? All I want, all I’ve wanted, is to sit down and talk to you, like we did when I was in hospital and you were looking after me. Back then, it felt so natural. It felt like we understood each other. But it’s clear something has changed. I’ve started to wonder if you’re deliberately avoiding me. I’ve started to wonder if that Spanish nurse said something to you: the one who’d dismissed me as I’d waited outside the ward; the one who’d eyed me with such suspicion, as if I were committing some crime in standing there. Maybe he’d gone back inside the ward afterwards, or he’d called you on his way home and told you I wanted to talk to you. He probably called me strange or weird or creepy. In fact, he probably had a good laugh at my expense. Did you join in with him, Derryn? Did you laugh at me too? I hope not.
I never would have pegged you for that type of person, but then I never would have pegged you for the type of person who might dismiss the choice of gift I gave you – that rare copy of No One Can See the Crows at Night – in such a callous fashion. I mean, I get that a relationship is about compromise – I just told you I understand that – so I have to accept your character flaws if we’re ever going to be together, but I can’t pretend you didn’t insult me a little the day I gave you that gift. There are only about a hundred copies left in the entire world, and now you have one of them. Did you know that? So, when you reacted like you did, barely even remarking on my gift, I’ll be totally honest: you hurt me, Derryn.
You hurt me greatly.
And, in turn, for the first time, I really wanted to hurt you.
DAY FIVE
* * *
45
My watch beeped gently.
It was 5 a.m.
Beyond the walls of the interview room, I could hear traffic out on the main road, the intermittent drone of engines as lorries rolled by, and the occasional rogue firework as the New Year celebrations bled into the first morning of January.
In front of me were three plastic coffee cups, all of which I’d emptied, and an untouched cheese and ham sandwich one of the officers had bought from a petrol station down the road. He said it was the best he could do because the canteen was closed and nowhere was open this early on New Year’s Day.
It didn’t matter. I wasn’t hungry.
I looked down at what I was wearing now: a pair of grey tracksuit trousers and a hooded top that didn’t belong to me. My clothes, the ones I’d worn yesterday, the ones I’d been wearing when I found Gavin Roddat’s body, were in evidence bags. As soon as I’d arrived at Kentish Town station, I’d agreed to be fingerprinted, to let the police take nail scrapings; I’d answered an hour’s worth of questions about what I had been doing at the house, why, and what I’d discovered. I’d even had to justify my decision to call Field directly, as if my choice to phone her and tell her about Roddat, and not to call 999 instead, had in some way been questionable. I assumed that would get straightened out once she arrived at the station, because there was no way she and Kent weren’t coming. Roddat was the prime suspect in their potential kidnapping.
At five thirty, the door finally opened and three officers filed in: Field, Kent, and a Scottish DI in his fifties called Carmichael, who’d spoken to me already. He had thinning blond hair, a goatee, and was built like a truck. His bulk seemed to be made up from fat more than muscle, his shirt struggling to house his belly, but I still wouldn’t have fancied my chances in a straight fight. In the brief conversation I’d had with him on arriving, he’d been the one cop who appeared willing to take me at my word.
As Carmichael sat down, Field pulled out an adjacent chair and Kent went to the corner of the room where a third seat was propped against the wall.
‘Hello again, Mr Raker,’ Field said. I greeted her and then glanced at Kent. He had his notebook out, his legs crossed, his eyes fixed on me. It was clear he thought that this was some elaborate attempt by me to play them, or to alter the focus of the case. Or maybe he just didn’t like the turn that everything had taken.
I didn’t disagree with him.
Gavin Roddat had come completely out of left field. He worked for the estate agency that looked after the flat at Chalk Farm, but until he appeared on CCTV the night the woman was kidnapped, he’d been so far off my radar he’d barely registered as a blip. Now he was on a mortuary slab, a suicide whose last moments were spent watching an old, stolen home movie of Derryn and me. Nothing about that made sense.
Carmichael started the tape, introduced everyone, made it clear that I wasn’t under arrest – although I could feel a yet hanging there, unspoken – and, because of that, I’d waived the right to a solicitor for the time being. After we were done, he asked me to go over my account of finding Roddat again – how I ended up at his cousin’s place and why, and a step-by-step version of how I entered the property. I repeated the same things I’d said earlier, not just because they were easy to remember and were the truth, but because it was basically a test: they were seeing if my story had holes in it.
After I was done, there was a long silence.
This was another test, one I’d seen repeated many times; one I’d used myself on occasions. Long silences tended to make people uncomfortable, and when they were uncomfortable, they felt the need to fill gaps, to talk, to answer questions that hadn’t been asked, and that was when they made mistakes. It was basically a fishing exercise on Carmichael’s part, an attempt to pounce on any contradictions or errors.
So I just stared across the table at him.
Eventually, I saw a flicker of a smile on Field’s face, her eyes on what she’d written: she could see I’d figured out Carmichael’s tactics, and then so too did Carmichael himself. He came forward at the table and said, ‘DS Field and DC Kent were telling me about the woman claiming to be your wife.’ He was softly spoken, his voice just a notch above a whisper. I wasn’t sure if it was actually the way he talked, or another, subtle ploy. ‘Have you found out her identity yet?’
‘No.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing.’ I glanced at Field. ‘Why, have you?’
She shook her head. I couldn’t see any obvious signs that she was lying, nothing in her eyes or her face, although the truth was, I didn’t know her, so it was hard to be sure. I returned my attention to Carmichael, then to Kent. Carmichael was staring at me, unmoved; Kent was busy writing.
‘Any idea where we might find her?’ Carmichael said.
‘You don’t think I’d tell you if I knew?’
No one responded.
‘No,’ I sighed. ‘I don’t know where she is.’
‘What do you think “I’m sorry” means?’
He was referring to Roddat’s suicide note.
‘I hope it means he was repentant.’
‘Repentant?’
‘Before he killed himself.’
‘What should he be repentant for?’
‘I’m sure you can guess.’
I’d already admitted to him that I’d seen the footage of Roddat and the woman at the flat in Chalk Farm, although I’d stopped short of revealing how exact
ly I’d got hold of the footage. Carmichael had tried to press me for details, but if I told him, I sold Ewan Tasker down the river – and there was no way I would ever do that.
‘Mr Raker?’ Carmichael prompted.
‘Like I said, you’ve seen the CCTV footage of him and the woman.’
‘You think he’s sorry about that?’
‘I hope it’s that.’
‘As opposed to what?’
‘As opposed to him being sorry for killing her.’
A hush settled across the room.
I’m sorry could easily have meant that she was dead; they knew that already, they just wanted me to say it. And maybe she was dead. I really, desperately hoped not, but I had no real idea what Roddat was capable of or how far he was prepared to go. But what I knew, and what the cops didn’t, was that she was alive for a time after being taken from the flat – because she’d been in my house. I didn’t understand, and couldn’t see, the link between a psychiatrist and an estate agent – McMillan was a respected doctor, a father, a pillar of the community; Roddat was an estate agent who liked to shag around – but it was clear that they were working together.
Whatever their arrangement was, they must have brought her to me, presumably because they knew I wouldn’t be able to admit as much to the police without looking complicit in her disappearance; and in doing so – in refusing to tell the police about those hours in my home – my account of what I’d been doing during the time I’d blacked out looked even flakier than ever. It was a set-up and, in large part, it had worked: it helped play into the idea that I was either sick or a liar. So, if their plan had worked, why did Roddat kill himself and where the hell was McMillan? And there was another thought creeping into my head too, growing like a weed: was I putting the woman at risk by not telling the police what I knew?
‘So you think this woman’s dead?’ Carmichael asked.