You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  For whatever reason, they were all lying.

  ‘She told you her name was Derryn?’ I asked.

  He frowned. ‘Why, are you saying that wasn’t her name?’

  I sidestepped the question. ‘You said she used to come in here?’ My voice was still unsteady. I breathed in again, cleared my throat, repeated myself.

  ‘Are you all right, son? Do you want a seat?’

  ‘I’m fine. You said she used to come in here?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, still watching me, his brow furrowed beneath the silver of his hairline. ‘She hasn’t been in for a while. A couple of months maybe, maybe more.’

  ‘You two must have talked a lot if she told you her name?’

  ‘I guess. But I talk to most people who come in here; I know a lot of names. She just happens to be very nice, very easy to talk to.’ He looked away, reeling in a memory. ‘She has lovely eyes. They’re this really bright blue. A lovely smile too.’

  ‘What did you talk about with her?’

  ‘Books, mostly.’ He shrugged, glanced at my mobile, which I still had in my hand, and then at the business card on the counter between us. Something occurred to him: ‘Is Derryn missing then?’

  ‘No.’

  I said it automatically, instinctively. But the truth was, his version of Derryn – the one who came in here – hadn’t been seen in four days.

  ‘Uh, well …’ I tried to sound composed. ‘That’s what I’m trying to establish.’

  His expression changed: a flash of concern.

  ‘Did she say where she lived?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t have library cards here?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘it’s not that sort of library.’

  ‘But do you know if she was local?’

  ‘I don’t know that either. Sorry.’

  I looked around the room again.

  ‘Any CCTV?’

  ‘No. No, we don’t have anything like that.’

  And there was none immediately outside. It might be possible to trace her to this general area – Plumstead, the surrounding districts – on one of the days she’d come here. It might be possible to source footage from cameras within the radius of the library and try to pick up her trail that way, but it would be hundreds of man hours of work. Roy couldn’t remember the exact date she last came in, and with no idea in which direction she’d approached or exited, I’d basically be asking for weeks, months, of tape with no real idea of where to start.

  ‘She loves the work of Eva Gainridge, I know that.’

  I looked at Roy. ‘What?’

  ‘She’s a big fan of Eva Gainridge.’

  ‘She told you that?’

  ‘Yes. She said that was why her husband told her to come here.’

  I felt a prickle beneath my scalp.

  ‘Have you ever seen her …’ I could barely say it. ‘… husband?’

  ‘He used to come in here a lot on his own when we first opened this place, but he hasn’t been in for a while. The last time I saw him, they came in together.’

  I took a step closer.

  ‘He came in here with her?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, trying to figure out if he’d hit on something useful.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Oooh, four years back. Five, maybe.’

  ‘How many times did they come in together?’

  ‘Once. Twice at most.’

  ‘What did her husband look like?’

  ‘I’d say he was probably in his thirties. Your sort of build and height.’ Roy stopped, looking me up and down. ‘Same colour hair as you too.’

  I dropped my head and looked at the counter, at my business card, not because I was reading from it, but because I needed something to focus on. I didn’t want Roy to spot the doubt on my face. I’d been past this, I’d broken through to the other side. It wasn’t Derryn. I wasn’t sick.

  The woman’s husband wasn’t me.

  I gathered myself and zeroed in on something I knew for sure: there was a man vaguely matching the description Roy had given – medium build, my sort of height – on the Chalk Farm CCTV footage.

  ‘You sure you’re all right, son? Do you want something to drink?’

  I looked up at him again, back in control. ‘I’m fine,’ I said, smiling, trying to tell him everything was normal. ‘Anything else you remember about the husband? Any identifying features? Did he wear glasses? Did he have facial hair?’

  ‘A couple of days’ beard growth, maybe.’

  ‘Was he smart? Scruffy?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just kind of …’ He paused. ‘Average.’

  ‘Short hair? Long hair?’

  ‘Normal, really. Just a normal length.’

  Medium height and build, normal length hair, average in terms of the way he dressed, maybe a bit of stubble, maybe not – it wasn’t going to take me anywhere. If he had worn glasses, if he was smartly dressed, there had existed the faint possibility this ‘husband’ might have been Erik McMillan. But, deep down, I knew it wasn’t.

  It was the guy in the video.

  ‘Wait,’ Roy said, his tone suddenly different, more frantic. ‘Wait a second. He could have had a tattoo.’

  I looked at him. ‘A tattoo?’

  ‘I can’t remember where exactly.’ He glanced at himself. ‘Or maybe I’m mixing him up with someone else.’ He frowned, rubbing the side of his hand against his brow. ‘I don’t know. It’s been a long time since he’s been in.’

  ‘Any idea what the tattoo was of?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. Sorry. I wish I could remember.’

  I scanned the room again.

  ‘You said Derryn liked Eva Gainridge?’

  ‘Yes. But she told me she’s a big reader generally. She reads all sorts. When she comes in here, she buys rather than borrows, which is another reason we got talking. We obviously appreciate her custom – I mean, borrowing books is fine, but buying is better, right? We still have to pay rates, after all.’ He smiled, but then the smile fell away when he saw my expression. I was struggling to suppress my anxiety. It was all over my face. My Derryn had been a big reader. She’d loved bookshops. She’d loved libraries. Roy said, ‘She usually spends about twenty quid whenever she comes in here.’

  I gave myself a second to think.

  ‘You said her husband told her to come in here because she liked Gainridge.’ I looked around me. ‘Does that mean you’re well stocked?’

  ‘With Gainridge? Oh yes, definitely.’

  ‘Are you a fan too?’

  ‘A big fan,’ he said. ‘She’s a genius. I love all her books, but my favourite one is definitely Exit Music from Cemetery City because of the –’

  ‘So you’re always on the lookout for her books?’ I said, cutting him off.

  He looked a little hurt.

  ‘Always,’ he said, quietly at first. ‘Some editions of her novels are extremely rare and worth a lot of money. People give us all sorts of old novels – paperbacks they’ve found in boxes they’ve dug out of the loft, or in the garage or wherever – and they genuinely have no idea of the worth of what they’ve let gather dust.’

  ‘So some of the old editions sell for a lot of money?’

  ‘They can. Some I’ll keep back, for my own collection …’ He faded out, more sheepish now: siphoning off the best stuff wasn’t exactly in the spirit of a community library. ‘Anyway, we have people – like Derryn – who obviously know what they’re looking for.’

  ‘What about her husband – was he a Gainridge fan as well? You said it was him that suggested she should come here in the first place?’

  ‘He probably told her I knew what I was talking about. I mean, back when he used to come in on his own, he’d always ask if we had any new Gainridge stock in. He especially loved The Man with the Wolf’s Head. He’d always look out for that.’

  ‘You mean, he keeps on buying the same book over and over again?’

  ‘Reissues of
the same book,’ Roy said, correcting me. ‘I assumed he was some sort of collector, because The Man with the Wolf’s Head has been reissued in fifteen different editions over the years, with fifteen different covers, and some of those are extremely hard to get hold of. The 1982 reissue – to coincide with the release of Gainridge’s third novel, Garden Apex – is just one example of that. They’ll go for two hundred quid each. There are other examples.’

  I thought of the book I’d found in the loft.

  ‘What about No One Can See the Crows at Night?’

  ‘Exactly the same.’ Roy dug around in a drawer next to him and brought out his own mobile phone. He started to hunt on it for something. ‘There was a 1998 print run of Crows,’ he said, ‘that had a typographical flaw in it, and a mistake in the artwork. It was basically one big balls-up, so they ended up pulping most of them. There are only about a hundred copies left.’

  He handed me his phone. On it was an edition of No One Can See the Crows at Night: a close-up of a crow on a branch, blood on its beak, a Normandy cemetery reflected in its eye. It was exactly the same edition as the one I’d found in the loft.

  Derryn: Thank you for our special time together x.

  ‘Did you ever get one of these in?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve only ever had one.’

  ‘Do you remember who you sold it to?’

  He nodded. ‘I sold it to Derryn’s husband.’

  #0799

  I’ve decided to forgive you, Derryn.

  I realize now that your husband acted the way he did at the hospital because he thought he was protecting you. He was under the mistaken belief that you and I didn’t know each other, that we didn’t have countless things in common, that we didn’t share a connection. When he saw us together in the hospital, he had no idea.

  He was jealous too, I think.

  He seemed simple and oafish, and I’m afraid that type of person will always exist in a very black-and-white world; they can’t see the complexities of life, the texture. A man like that could never hope to understand the way our relationship works, its layers and subtleties, and I suspect he saw the way we were together and the only way he could counteract it was through a physical show of force. When he pushed me away from you, he was basically demonstrating the extent of who he is.

  And I get it, I really do: you’re sick, and – psychologically – you need someone at your side who you feel will physically protect you, in some way, from the cancer. But he can’t, Derryn. Your husband has no power to stop what is happening to you. So what, in the end, is his purpose? What does he bring to your life? When you get better, what then? Is he going to sit down with you and talk about art, or literature, or music, or politics? Will he be able to look you in the face and see what is on your mind without you even having to utter a word? Will he forgive you your mistakes like I have? I mean, I can’t pretend that I’m not hurt that you would lie to me about being married, but all of us, at one time or another, have lied about things. For the last four years, I’ve lied about what happened to Nora. When I run into her friends and they ask me if I’ve seen her around, I tell them she cheated on me – which she did – and she left me without saying goodbye.

  That bit’s only partially true.

  She left me, but she didn’t do it voluntarily. I took her to a patch of land close to where I live, this remote spot where no one would see us, and I said I needed to tell her something. And when we got there, when she started to twig that something was up, she started screaming and shouting and making a noise, and I basically had no choice. I grabbed the first thing I could find. I hit her.

  I buried her among the rubble.

  See? We all lie, Derryn. I’m not proud of what I’ve done and I don’t enjoy keeping things back from you, but we do whatever we think is best, don’t we? You married your husband thinking it was for the best, and maybe it was at the time, but it’s not any more. Now he’s simply in the way; a blockage, detritus between us.

  So I’ve started following him.

  As we’re being honest, I feel I need to tell you that. I’ve been following him since the events at the hospital. Last night I followed him into the supermarket. I saw him walking the aisles with the trolley, getting things for you both. He bumped into someone he knew, a woman, and they talked for a while, and the way he was around her – smiling, pretending to put a brave face on things – it was disgusting. He’s already moved on from you in his head, Derryn – do you realize that?

  He’s mourned you already.

  He’s given up on you.

  I stood in the shadows and watched him loading the shopping into the back of your car and I thought to myself, ‘I could end this now.’ I realized how easy it would be: it would be as easy as walking across the car park and severing his carotid artery. There was no one else around. There was no one to stop me.

  He’d be dead inside a minute.

  And he’d never see me coming.

  55

  Ninety minutes later, I arrived in Kew.

  I spent half an hour doing circuits of McMillan’s house, trying to get a sense of who was at home in adjacent properties, who might have an uninterrupted view of his home, and whether this was a trap. I saw no cars parked up and watching, as I had done the night I’d gone to Gavin Roddat’s home in Tottenham, and I had no sense that the police were here. On the back of my hand, I still had Kelly written in biro – the name of McMillan’s wife – and, in my head, the five numbers for the alarm, but as much as I wanted to get inside, I refused to be rushed.

  I needed to be completely sure Field hadn’t sold me out.

  I retreated to the shadows and watched the house, thinking again about what Roy had told me at the community library. He’d said he’d sold the copy of No One Can See the Crows at Night to Derryn’s husband. Except that man hadn’t been me, and the woman who went there looking for books wasn’t Derryn. It was all a trick, a blurred line between what was true and what wasn’t, what was fiction and fact. The two of them – the husband and the wife – were frauds.

  But, among their lies, I could see one grain of truth.

  If my Derryn – the real Derryn – had been given a copy of the book, if its first page had been marked with a PCCL stamp, if the only copy Roy had ever had pass through his doors was that one, then it meant the edition the so-called husband had bought there had been the one I’d found in the loft. If that was the case, it meant he’d definitely known my Derryn before she died, he’d written the message that I’d discovered inside the pages of the book to her – not to the woman pretending to be her – and he’d given it to my Derryn as a gift. And then she’d dumped it in the loft.

  I was certain that man was the same one I’d met at the hospital. I was certain he was the figure in the shadows at Chalk Farm.

  Now I just had to prove it.

  I checked my watch and saw that I’d been waiting forty-five minutes. That was enough time. I headed for the front door of McMillan’s house. It was under a porch, a hanging basket swinging gently to one side of it, a solid wall on the other, and there was enough shadow – because of where the sun was at this time of day, the cloud cover, the pallid tint of winter – for me to hide from view.

  All the same, as I got out my picks, as I slipped on gloves and a pair of shoe covers, I checked around me again. Everything was quiet.

  The lock on McMillan’s door was more complicated than the one I’d popped at Chalk Farm, so it took me longer to get in. A few times I had to pause, hands steady, tension wrench in place, and check over my shoulder as a car passed. Once, I heard voices and laughter in a house close by. Mostly, though, it was quiet.

  Finally, when I heard the familiar click, I dropped the picks into my pocket, and – still in a crouch, checking the street again – pushed the door open an inch.

  Immediately, the alarm began to beep.

  I found the panel on the inside of the door, a series of lights flashing on it. As I put in the code Field had given me, I looked over my should
er, still unsure why she would do this for me, why she would jeopardize her career and the integrity of the investigation, but when the house fell silent, I realized it really wasn’t a trick. The code worked and no one was coming for me.

  I closed the door and took in the downstairs hallway.

  Despite the fact that it was the middle of the day, the house was still gloomy, but on one of the walls closest to me, I could see a nest of family photographs. I used the torch app on my phone and approached it. A lot of them were the same: his daughter, Caitlin, at various stages of her childhood, sometimes alone, sometimes with McMillan, often with what must have been his wife, Kelly.

  Right at the edge of the wall of pictures was one of Kelly and McMillan back when they must have first started dating. He was in his early twenties and couldn’t have looked more different from now, his hair an untidy shock of black, the sharp angles of his beard replaced by a thin moustache. His glasses were different too: simple and conventional, with thick rims that hid the tops of his cheekbones and the entirety of his eyebrows. Kelly was mixed race and about the same age. She was wearing dark lipliner and pink blusher, acid-wash jeans and a neon T-shirt, but none of her questionable fashion choices could dim her beauty. Dark-haired, dark-eyed and petite, she had a genuine smile and a face that carried the glow of it. Field had said she’d cut her wrists in the bath ten years ago and it made me wonder how she’d reached that stage. Had she been suffering from depression even back then? Or was it something that had crept in later, becoming a part of her in more recent times?

  Caitlin was a good mix of her mother and father: she had Kelly’s beauty, the smoothness of her skin, the radiance of her smile, but her father’s eyes, hints of the same expression I’d seen in the hour before my blackout at St Augustine’s. As I looked at her, I wondered if it was possible that she had misled the police. She’d said she didn’t know where McMillan was, that she hadn’t heard from him since she’d phoned him about the mysterious ‘Dartford’ caller on the 29th, but was this just another story to add to the ones her father had told me?