You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  FIELD: You told us earlier that you were missing.

  WOMAN: Did I?

  FIELD: For almost eight years.

  WOMAN: I don’t think I said that.

  FIELD: You did.

  WOMAN: I’m sure I didn’t.

  FIELD: You did. But you say you’re living with David. So how is that missing?

  WOMAN: It’s not. I said we got separated, not that I was missing.

  FIELD: You and David got separated?

  WOMAN: Yes. Perhaps that’s where the confusion comes from.

  FIELD: Where did you get separated?

  WOMAN: At the pharmacy.

  Had she been playing a game with Field? Or was she genuinely confused? A lot of the things she’d said in that interview – her lack of knowledge about London and about using the Tube; her easily disproved claims that she worked as a nurse; her sudden need to come to Charing Cross – hadn’t added up, and I’d never been able to work out if it was duplicity or sickness. If she was sick, and McMillan was treating her, why wasn’t he helping her through the usual channels? Why were his notes confined to fourteen scruffy pages hidden in a mailbox? Field had said that they’d been through McMillan’s office – it was where they’d found his meagre file on me – so it was likely, after securing a court order, they’d been able to cross-check the description of the woman with photographs of other patients he’d looked after during his time at St Augustine’s. If they hadn’t found Melody Campbell, then she had either never been a patient at the hospital, or everything that had been collated on her had been dumped before McMillan went to ground.

  I looked at her photograph again.

  Within the confines of a picture an inch and a half high, it was difficult to spot her similarities to Derryn, because eight years ago they were so small – really, just her eyes – so it would have been even harder for the police: they’d have been looking at hundreds of photographs, countless faces in huge missing persons lists, and with no idea what her name was – no hint, like me, that it was Melody – there was nothing to grab their attention. Without a name, there was no starting point for a search other than the physical description of the woman the day she’d turned up at the station – and, here, she looked nothing like that.

  I enlarged the image. The more I looked, the more I started to see it wasn’t just the eyes: the brow and the nose were the same as the woman’s too – and close enough to Derryn’s – they were just disguised behind starker, more dominant differences. Eight years ago, Melody Campbell’s hair was a chestnut brown, not blonde, and she was wearing it much shorter, almost boyishly. The Melody Campbell who’d turned up at the police station on Thursday was slim, but the Campbell in this photograph wasn’t. Here, she was probably two or three stone overweight, thin spirals of fat gathered on top of each other beneath her shirt, the material exposing their outline. Her neck was puffy, and her arms carried the excess that came with weight gain. It had subtly changed the topography of her face, obscuring many of the main lines and contours that – years later – would make her a near-facsimile of my wife.

  Melody Campbell was pretty, well dressed, her smile full and rich, but she wasn’t Derryn; and she certainly wasn’t her back then. If I hadn’t had such a connection to the woman she was trying to ape – if I’d been in Field’s shoes, or Carmichael’s, or someone who didn’t know Derryn at all – I’d most likely have passed right by her.

  There was a link to a proper missing poster on her page. I clicked on it. The same photograph was on the left-hand side, but there was some additional information on the right. Her birth date confirmed her age as forty-three, which made her a year older than Derryn would have been, and she’d vanished on 27 February 2010.

  Beneath that was a very brief outline of her last sighting:

  Melody Campbell was last seen at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole.

  What had she been doing in Birmingham?

  I googled her disappearance. It had made a minor splash, but only in local newspapers. I’d expected those local newspapers to be based in the Midlands, but they weren’t.

  They were in Northern Ireland.

  I followed a link to a story in the Belfast Telegraph. It didn’t amount to much, just an appeal for information, but halfway in, I got the background I was after: she and her parents were from Berkshire, but they’d moved to Belfast after her father got a job at Bombardier, the aerospace company, in 1989, when Melody was fifteen. After leaving school, she’d ended up working at Bombardier too, in the HR department, and had been in Birmingham attending a recruitment conference at the NEC when she’d vanished.

  I hunted around for more details, but while her parents had never stopped in their efforts to find out what had happened to her, they’d died within a year of each other in 2012 and 2013, and Melody had no siblings to continue the work.

  She was never found.

  Until now.

  I looked at her face, trying to imagine what had happened at that conference. In the newspaper article, it said she’d gone outside for a cigarette at the end of the night, after enjoying drinks with some colleagues at the hotel bar, but didn’t come down for breakfast the next morning. One of the men she worked with went up to check on her, couldn’t get a response, and raised the alarm. When the manager opened up her room, Melody’s clothes were all gone, her toiletries too, her handbag but not her phone. That was the only thing she’d left behind.

  So where did she go? Why was she back now? And why, on her return, was she pretending to be Derryn?

  I looked again at the location of her last sighting: a hotel outside the country’s largest exhibition centre. Was there any link between the location of her disappearance and the fact that Erik McMillan frequently attended conferences? Could they have been in Birmingham at the same time?

  As I turned everything over, a separate idea formed.

  I put in a fresh search, this time using the terms Derryn, Melody and Raker. The first result was for the ‘Crime and Punishment’ blog on FeedMe. Under that were links to other newspaper stories, some years old, written off the back of cases I’d worked, and long since put to bed, that had bled into the public eye, none of which was relevant to this. I scrolled back up.

  Beneath the search bar and the number of results was:

  Did you mean: Kerrin Melody Raker?

  I clicked it to see where it would take me, and found an altered set of results. At the top was a link to a tweet from an account called @merrigoldsdeli.

  Merrigolds Deli on Twitter: “The weirdest thing just happened …

  http://www.twitter.com/MerrigoldsDeli/status/96464497474.html

  There had been no keyword match for Raker, and in the preview Google had provided there was only a description of who the account belonged to:

  Merrigold’s Deli is an award-winning restaurant and delicatessen in the beautiful Sussex village of Killiger. Tweets by Pat Merrigold.

  I followed the link, uncertain about why it had been rated as the most relevant hit in Google – but then I read it and something began to congeal inside me.

  Merrigolds Deli @MerrigoldsDeli 12 Sept 2013

  The weirdest thing just happened. A woman came in asking for directions to, erm, Belfast (???) She seemed confused & didn’t have an Irish accent. Uh?

  A second and third tweet had been threaded to the first.

  Merrigolds Deli @MerrigoldsDeli 12 Sept 2013

  Maybe even weirder, I asked her what her name was and she said it was Kerrin (? I think). But then before she left she said it was Melody. Uh x 2?

  Merrigolds Deli @MerrigoldsDeli 12 Sept 2013

  She didn’t even know it was Killiger. Not sure if it was a joke or if I should be concerned. Very short blonde hair & slim. Anyone seen her around the village? #twilightzonemusic

  No one had responded to say they’d seen the same woman, but it simply had to be her. It had to be Melody.

  It didn’t matter to me that the owner of the deli seemed to think she referred to herself initia
lly as Kerrin. I was almost positive she hadn’t; instead, I believed the woman at the deli had misheard Derryn, perhaps because both names – Kerrin and Derryn – were unusual, perhaps because the woman’s request was so odd. The connection to Belfast tallied with what I’d found out about Melody already.

  The question was why.

  Why had she gone in there to ask directions to Belfast? Why didn’t she seem to know where she was, where Belfast was, even the area the deli was in?

  What had she been doing in Sussex in the first place?

  I went to a new tab and started reading about Killiger. It was a tiny village, right on the English Channel, between Seaford and Eastbourne, barely more than a single street with a pub, a newsagent, a grocery and a butcher’s. From London, it was an easy two-hour drive.

  I looked at the date of the incident in Killiger: September 2013. That was two and a half years after Melody Campbell disappeared, and over four years before she walked into the police station at Charing Cross. So was there anything to be read into the timings? I couldn’t see an obvious pattern.

  I couldn’t see anything about this that made any sort of sense.

  I switched to Google Maps, zooming in for a close-up of the village, and kept swapping between Map and Satellite views, trying to see if anything leapt out at me.

  There was nothing.

  But then, right at the edge of the laptop’s screen, on the eastern boundaries of Killiger, something caught my eye and I realized I was wrong.

  It was a cove, a beach, cut into the sweeping chalk cliffs that ran along this part of the coast. A road led down to a small car park, and next to the car park was a café and a children’s play area.

  Above the play area hovered its name.

  The Dartford Memorial Park.

  61

  There was nothing about the memorial park on Google other than a small description on the East Sussex County Council website, which described exactly what was there – some swings, a roundabout, a climbing frame. There was no direct link to Bruce Dartford.

  I put in another search for him and found the same stories I’d already read: he’d been travelling back to London from a medical conference in Sheffield, a lorry had jackknifed in front of him on the M1, and he’d ploughed into it. Two cars had smashed into the back of his Mercedes and he died later in hospital from severe brain injuries. From what I could tell, he’d been in London for years; certainly there was no obvious information online that connected him to a village on the East Sussex coast.

  So was it just a huge coincidence that a park there carried his surname?

  It was after seven o’clock at night, so even if I’d wanted to cold-call the deli, the butcher’s or the grocery store in Killiger, I couldn’t. So that really only left me two options: either I had to try and cold-call every single house in the village – from what I could tell, that amounted to about fifteen homes – or I gave the pub a shot first, hoping something would land.

  I dialled the pub on my prepaid.

  A gruff male voice answered: ‘The Crown.’

  ‘Evening, sir. I’m calling from the Metropolitan Police in London.’ I paused for a moment, letting him take that in. I could have called on my own phone and told him who I was, but I needed him to focus, and pretending to be from the police was always the quickest way to get someone’s attention. ‘We’re looking into a case that involved someone we think came from Killiger, and I’m afraid I haven’t had a lot of success so far in getting the information I need. Have you got a minute?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, his voice softening.

  ‘Have you heard of a Bruce Dartford?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. His mum lived here.’

  I felt a shot of adrenalin. ‘His mum?’

  ‘Margaret. Mags.’

  ‘Is she still around?’

  ‘No,’ the man said. ‘Mags died, ooooh, ten, eleven years back. Nice lady, that one. Lovely sense of humour.’ He was starting to warm up now. ‘Anyway, Bruce used to come down here to visit her a lot. He had some fancy job up in London somewhere – a doctor of some kind. Psychologist or psychiatrist or whatever you call it. Never know the difference. Uh, you know he’s dead as well, right?’

  ‘Yes, I read that.’

  ‘He died in a car accident on the M1, up near Luton.’

  I looked at my laptop again, at the satellite map of the village.

  ‘So was the play park named after him?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Cos he died,’ the man responded, ‘obviously.’

  ‘Yeah, but people die every day, don’t they? So why was Bruce different? What made the village commemorate him in that way?’

  ‘People liked him round here. He did a lot for this place. Back in the mid 2000s, some big shot from Brighton wanted to build an industrial estate half a mile inland. It would have been a disaster. Traffic, pollution, half the green belt destroyed. I mean, the guy was a total arsehole. I hated him, refused to serve him in here. I told him one night, “You can’t –” ’

  I cut him short, before we got wildly off topic.

  ‘Bruce didn’t agree with the industrial estate being built either?’

  ‘No way,’ he said, clearly disappointed that I didn’t want to hear about how he’d refused to serve the developer a drink. ‘No, he ran a campaign against it. Did it almost single-handedly. When it went to court, he even paid all the legal fees himself.’

  Bruce Dartford was generous, altruistic – how was that relevant? Where was all of this going? Dragging the map back and forth with the cursor, I kept zooming in and out, trying to see something new at the play park, but instead my gaze snagged on something else: a line I’d just added to my notebook.

  Mother lived in Killiger.

  ‘You said his mum lived there?’ I asked.

  ‘Mags? Yeah, all her life.’

  ‘Where was her house?’

  ‘Just out of the village,’ he said, ‘between here and the beach.’

  I looked at the map again, trying to find it on the satellite image.

  ‘He turned it into two holiday cottages,’ the man said.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Bruce. After she died, he turned her house into two holiday cottages. Did it really nicely, actually. Quiet, minimal fuss. Respectful of his surroundings, the scenery, that sort of thing. It’s all – what do you call it? – green. Renewable energy and all that. He named it after his mum – Margaret Cottages.’

  Finally, I found it on the map.

  It was alone, among fields, half a mile from the beach.

  ‘He was pretty generous with that too,’ the man said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘After he died, he left it to the hospital he worked for in London.’

  That stopped me.

  ‘Are you talking about St Augustine’s?’

  ‘I don’t know what it’s called,’ the man said, ‘but it was their charity arm. The hospital doesn’t run it, the fundraising bit does. Same thing, I suppose.’

  Except it wasn’t the same thing at all.

  If the police had even thought to look for property that St Augustine’s might have owned, which was doubtful, the cottages in Killiger weren’t in the hospital’s name, they were in the name of their charity, Asclepius. I’d read all about it on the hospital website. That made it harder to find, not just because it was named after a Greek god and wasn’t easily affiliated to the hospital, but because the charity arm would most likely be registered, structured and organized in a completely different way. Its contracts, paperwork, accounts and legal documents were probably at another address entirely.

  ‘Do you know if the cottages are occupied at the moment?’

  ‘First week of January?’ the man said. ‘I doubt it. The tourist trade tends to be dead until Easter and then it all kicks off.’

  ‘But you don’t know for sure?’

  ‘Trust me, no one ever stays here at this time of the year.’

/>   And that was the whole point.

  That was what made the cottages such a good hiding place.

  #0858

  It was your wedding anniversary yesterday.

  I know that from going through some of the papers in your loft. I watched your house most of the afternoon and evening, to see if I could catch a glimpse of you. I thought your husband may have done something for you, the kind of perfunctory celebration that only he would think was deserving of you. A cake, perhaps. A meal. Some tacky little gift.

  Did he do that, Derryn?

  I don’t know, because until today I hadn’t seen you for a week. That’s the longest we’ve ever been. I didn’t catch a glimpse of you in any of the windows; I hardly saw your husband either. I spent seven days watching the house, trying to understand what was going on, and the only time anything changed was on day five when a man in a silver van turned up. He went inside, spent forty minutes with you, and when he left again, I could see that your husband had been crying.

  I only realized later that the man was from the hospice.

  So are you really sick now, Derryn?

  If you are, your husband’s weakness isn’t going to help. You can’t fight if you have a man like that at your side. He may be physically big, but I realize now that he’s vulnerable. He thinks all of this is about him. Those tears are about him, about what he’s losing, not about you. He’s not good enough for you, and I imagine this is the point at which you’re starting to realize it. When the man from the hospice left, your husband looked a mess, an absolute fucking mess. I can only imagine what effect that must be having on you. You’re there, fighting for every breath in your lungs, and all he can do is sit and cry. He’s pathetic, isn’t he? You’re too kind, too graceful, to admit that he is, but I know you must be thinking that. You must look at him with utter contempt.