You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  He finally glanced at you.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ he said softly.

  ‘We were just having a conversation,’ I replied, sharp, pointed.

  He looked at me again, then at you, and I could see something pass between the two of you, something wordless that I couldn’t understand or grasp, because he immediately came around to the back of the wheelchair and grabbed the handles.

  ‘We’re having a conversation,’ I said again.

  ‘Well, now the conversation’s over.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ I replied, automatically trying to stop him, trying to grab the handles of the wheelchair, trying to push him aside. But he caught me by surprise. He planted a hand on my chest and shoved me, pushing me away so hard, I almost lost my footing. I looked around: a few people were staring at us. And then I looked at you: I expected you to defend me, to say something – but I could see the reality in your face.

  You were on his side.

  ‘Derryn?’ I said.

  ‘What’s your name, pal?’ the man asked.

  ‘None of your fucking business is my name. You can’t do this. You can’t come in here and do this. Derryn and I are friends. I was just having a conversation wi–’

  ‘I want to go home, David,’ you said to the man.

  I stared at you. ‘Derryn?’

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked me again.

  ‘What the fuck’s that got to do with you?’

  ‘It’s got everything to do with me. I’m her husband.’

  Husband.

  A single word more powerful than any hand he could lay on me. I looked at you, then back to him. ‘Husband?’ The word tasted sour in my mouth. ‘Husband?’

  You were married.

  You’d lied to me.

  He began wheeling you away – almost inviting me to follow, just so he could assault me again – and, when I didn’t, you looked back, over your shoulder, and I saw an expression on your face that I recognized immediately. It was a mix of hostility and fear.

  Once upon a time, Nora had looked at me exactly the same way.

  You remember Nora, right? I told you about her. I told you about how she broke my heart. I opened up to you that day on the ward and I told you that Nora had hurt me, had cheated on me. I told you that she was the one, before you, that I loved. Well, she would look at me in exactly the same way as you did when you left the hospital that day.

  She would do it all the time.

  So I’ve seen that look before, Derryn, the one you had. I’ve been betrayed like this before. I’ve seen that look of hostility in the faces of both women I’ve loved now.

  But it’s easy enough to get rid of hostility.

  And, once you do, all you have left is fear.

  Because that’s all anyone has left before you kill them.

  50

  ‘Could it have been Roddat?’

  I looked at Field.

  ‘It could have been,’ I said, still unable to quite picture the man, his face, his profile. ‘It was a long time ago: the third time Derryn was diagnosed with cancer – so after April 2009. It could even have been May or June. She’d had a round of chemo, I remember that much, and I remember she made the decision to stop shortly after.’ Once more, I tried to visualize him, but it had been nearly nine years. All I could see were fragments from the scene: how he’d been kneeling down beside her when I’d turned up; how he’d gestured at me when I started to wheel her out; some of the things he’d said; how I’d asked Derryn who he was as we made our way to the car, and how she’d told me he’d been a patient of hers once. And what else? Think. What else had she told me?

  Field checked her watch, looked out at the road, and then, in her pocket, her phone pinged. She removed the handset and eyed the screen.

  ‘Shit,’ she said through her teeth. ‘Carmichael. I really have to go.’

  I nodded, but my mind was still on the grey outline of the man in the hospital, irritated at my inability to recall him clearly. I had a good memory for faces, a decent ability to store and retain information like that, but eight years was way too long. In the December previous to that, we’d moved back from the US, and as an experiment, as I followed Field out towards the street, I tried to recall the faces of the people who’d worked in the same office as me while I’d been in LA – but I struggled to remember more than two or three of them, and they were people I’d had daily contact with. The others, the ones I interacted with less often, were just blurs, or in some cases total blanks. How, then, could I ever remember the face of a man I’d seen for two minutes in a hospital foyer getting on for a decade ago?

  And yet, I remembered how I’d felt when I met him. I’d told Field that there was something weird about him, and I vaguely recalled having to step in front of him, or around him, and I recalled Derryn being in a wheelchair as well, even though she didn’t want to be. If I’d sniffed any immediate danger, if I’d felt Derryn was under threat in any way, I would have headed it off. But I hadn’t felt the need to do that. I tried to rebuild the moments that followed that incident in my head, tried to think of how Derryn had described the man, but all I could remember was her telling me it didn’t matter, that he’d just become attached to her, that sometimes that happened on the wards. If I’d got the impression she was lying, that she was avoiding the truth or trying to deliberately downplay it, there’s no way I would have let it go like I did. But she’d been happy to forget him.

  Could it have been Roddat? Was that brief moment in the hospital that day why he was doing this to me? Why the woman was? Why the hell would they want me to believe that Derryn was alive? Or was my inability to remember or recognize Gavin Roddat because he wasn’t that man at all?

  ‘Raker?’

  We’d walked almost to the end of the arch, cars passing on the street a few feet from where we were standing, and I’d barely even noticed. Field was looking up and down the road, jittery now, skittish, worried about being seen here, with me.

  ‘I can’t be certain if it was Roddat or not,’ I said to her.

  ‘So this guy in the hospital could be no one important?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, but now the memory had resurfaced, something about it stayed with me, some instinctive sense that it was relevant. Derryn, for her part, had been happy to forget it. But had the man felt the same way? Did that one tiny moment have the same insignificance to him?

  Or was it where all of this had begun?

  ‘Have you located the pharmacy in Woolwich?’ I asked Field.

  I was trying to work out if the woman had actually gone there, and, if she had, whether the police had footage of the guy who took her. A car out on the street. The registration plate.

  She shook her head, checking her watch, her phone, the road: ‘There’s seventeen in the area. Twelve of them have got cameras close by, five haven’t. It looks like he chose the one he took her to carefully, because we haven’t located the car she arrived in – make, model, who was driving. Nothing. And because she never actually went in, the people working in the pharmacy wouldn’t have seen her. We chased down the council in an effort to find out the identity of the traffic warden who got into an argument with the driver, and – when we found him – he gave us a description. He says the car was light blue or grey, and either a Mondeo or a Lexus. He says the guy was medium height, medium build, dark hair, possibly a moustache or a goatee.’

  ‘So this traffic warden didn’t actually get around to issuing a ticket?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But he got the car reg?’

  ‘The last two letters. MX. The rest of the plate was covered in grime. Unfortunately, those last two letters have got us precisely nowhere.’

  We looked at each other and, again, I saw the same thing in Field’s face that I’d spotted earlier when we’d been talking about McMillan’s daughter.

  ‘Is there something else?’

  ‘At this point,’ she said, ‘I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of what I said
earlier. None of this came from me. We didn’t have this meeting.’

  ‘I get it. But is there something else?’

  She checked the street again.

  ‘You asked about McMillan’s daughter,’ she said, her eyes still on the road, on the people passing us, on the cars. ‘She really doesn’t know what’s happened to her father, I truly believe that. I’ve phoned her, I’ve talked to her on Skype twice, and a guy from the missing persons unit up there – a guy I used to work with for a while down here – went around to interview her for me. He says she’s either the most flawless liar he’s ever met, or my hunch is correct: she’s not holding out.’ Finally, she looked at me again, her expression almost pained. ‘I’ve got to be honest, it was hard talking to her about McMillan, because she basically idolizes him. Her mum’s dead, he’s everything to her. She’s up in Edinburgh doing a degree in medicine because she says she wants to follow her old man into psychiatric work. But as much as she worships him, there’s no way she’s hiding him; and I don’t believe, for his part, that McMillan would jeopardize her safety in that way.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, because there obviously was something else.

  ‘That call that was made to McMillan on the payphone in Plumstead on the 28th of December – I don’t want to know how you got hold of his phone records, or from who, but were his the only phone records you got?’

  ‘As opposed to what?’

  ‘Do you know what other calls were made from that payphone the same day – specifically, immediately after the call to McMillan?’

  ‘No,’ I said, watching her. ‘Do you?’

  She nodded. ‘There was only one other call made from that payphone on that day, and it was twenty seconds after the call to McMillan.’

  ‘So it was made by the same person?’

  ‘That would be the assumption.’

  ‘Who was the call to?’

  ‘Caitlin McMillan. Erik’s daughter. She mentioned the call on both occasions I talked to her, and to my colleague up in Scotland too. She said someone – a male – phoned her on her mobile and said – and I quote – “Ask your father about Dartford.” ’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That was all he said.’

  ‘Dartford in Kent?’

  ‘That seems most likely.’

  I tried to think if the town of Dartford had ever come up in anything I’d discovered so far, but felt certain it hadn’t.

  ‘So did Caitlin speak to her father about it?’

  ‘Yes. She said she couldn’t get hold of him on the 28th, so phoned him at home first thing on the 29th and he told her he didn’t have the first idea what the call was about. He seemed concerned that she was getting strange messages.’

  ‘Has anyone from your team been down to Dartford?’

  ‘I sent someone down there yesterday to take a look, speak to the police there, ask around. No one’s seen McMillan.’

  ‘Anything at his place in Kew?’

  She reached into her pocket, took out her notebook and began flipping through its pages. When she finally stopped, she’d got to a page with nothing on it but a five-digit number.

  ‘We did a basic sweep,’ she said. ‘We didn’t find anything at his house.’

  I eyed her. ‘But?’

  She tore out the number and held up the piece of paper.

  ‘But maybe you can.’

  I looked at the number. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s the code for his house alarm.’

  For a second, I thought I’d misheard. I looked from the piece of paper to her, and said, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘You want me to break into McMillan’s home?’

  ‘What, you’re going to pretend you’ve never picked a lock before?’

  I smiled, but there was no humour in it. If I took the piece of paper from her, what then? Was this some kind of elaborate set-up? Would I get to Kew, get the door open and suddenly be overrun by officers lying in wait? I tried to imagine if this might be some plan dreamed up in an office, Carmichael pulling the strings. Field had already admitted that he wanted me stopped, punished for perceived slights against the Met, and the law.

  ‘You still don’t trust me?’ she said, her expression somewhere between disbelief and amusement.

  ‘How can I trust you when I don’t even know you?’

  ‘I don’t know you either, Raker – except by reputation – but I’ve just spent the last thirty minutes destroying the integrity of an entire investigation, so, if you sell me down the river, I’m in just as deep as you are.’ She looked at the piece of paper in her hands, at the digits written in pencil. ‘We’ve been to his house and taken a number of items already – including his electronics – but so far we haven’t found anything. That’s why I think it’s worth a second look.’ She checked her watch and then her phone. ‘But take it, don’t take it, I don’t give a shit. The woman, McMillan, Roddat – they’re destroying your life, not mine.’

  Studying her, I tried to see the lie in this, the deception that was going to send me to jail, but she looked right at me, unblinking.

  I took the piece of paper.

  ‘Now I definitely need to go,’ she said.

  I followed her out on to the street. It was still raining, water running off the curve of the brickwork. She had a hood on her coat, its edges finished in faux fur, which she flipped up before turning to me for the final time.

  Our eyes stayed on one another for a second.

  ‘What?’ she said, the rain against her shoulders.

  ‘I still don’t understand why you’re doing this.’

  ‘I already explained to you why.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘You don’t believe I want this case solved?’

  ‘No, I believe that,’ I said. ‘I believe that you think Carmichael’s running this investigation the wrong way. I believe everything you’ve told me about what evidence was recovered from the scene.’

  ‘Then what else is there?’

  You’re a cop, I thought. And cops hate me.

  She rolled her eyes at the lack of a response and looked out at the rain. ‘Just go and do what you do best,’ she said.

  And then she headed out into the storm.

  51

  I went straight home.

  I needed a shower; ideally, I needed to sleep. I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours and I was starting to feel it, the exhaustion a needle picking away at the seams. But even if I tried, I knew I wouldn’t drop off.

  I was too charged, too focused on what was ahead.

  I wanted to go back to Plumstead, to speak to someone at the library about the book I’d found in my loft, but, despite the fact that it felt like the middle of the afternoon, it was still only 8.15 a.m. The library didn’t open until eleven.

  There was McMillan’s house as well.

  I’d memorized the numbers for the alarm and dumped the piece of paper that Field had given me into the nearest bin. I’d kidded myself that it was to protect both of us, that the fewer trails leading back to our meeting in the arches, the better –but, in fact, I was primarily protecting myself. Despite everything, despite seeing all the sense in what she’d told me – how she was jeopardizing her career by contacting me, how the meeting could sink the legality of the entire investigation – I still wasn’t prepared to trust her completely. My doubts lay in those moments at the end, in her response to me – or lack of it – when I’d asked what she was keeping back.

  Because she was keeping something back.

  I could feel it.

  As soon as I got through the front door, I went to the sideboard in the living room and pulled out the home movies. The one of Derryn and me in Austria that I’d watched two nights ago was still there. So was the other one I’d selected, from the Christmas the year before she’d died. I couldn’t remember exactly what else was on the rest of the tapes but as I went through them one by one,
there didn’t seem to be any glaring omissions. All the holidays I remembered were here. The trips. The birthdays. The Christmases. Whatever tapes Roddat had stolen, whenever it was that he’d broken into my house, he must have put everything except the death certificate back.

  I showered, changed and then went through to the kitchen. I stood there and sank a glass of water, exhaustion ghosting through me again. My bones ached. My body was tired. Outside, in the street, the parties were all over, the skies were like granite, the rain was still hammering against the roof, and except for the sound of it, my house was absolutely silent. I wandered back through to the living room, taking in the home I’d once shared with my wife, and then stopped again: it had been like this for eight years, the walls and the floors, the air itself, heavy with the scent of loneliness – but most of the time I’d been able to ignore it. Now, though, it was impossible. I knew I wasn’t losing my mind any more, but I still felt haunted. I was haunted by the silence of my house, of my life, and by the same questions, repeating themselves over and over.

  Where the hell was the woman?

  Where was McMillan?

  Why were they doing this to me?

  I thought of Gavin Roddat again, swinging from a rope while a video of Derryn and I played beside him, and realized the questions didn’t end there. I had no idea why he’d become so obsessed with us. I had no idea why he would kill himself.

  From the bedroom, my phone started ringing.

  I snapped it out of the charger and saw it was the landline for my father’s old cottage down in Devon.

  Kennedy.

  I wedged the phone between my shoulder and my ear, and, as we spoke, started to pack a bag full of things I’d need over the next few hours. A copy of the woman’s photograph that Field had emailed to FeedMe. The edition of No One Can See the Crows at Night. Printouts of Gavin Roddat’s face. My prepaid mobile.

  My lock picks.

  ‘Can I call you later?’ I said to Kennedy, trying to head off a lengthy social call. ‘I’m in the middle of something.’