Missing Pieces Read online

  Tim Weaver

  * * *

  MISSING PIECES

  Contents

  BOOK ONE 1: Rebekah Chapter 1

  Before

  Chapter 2

  Before

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Before

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Before

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Before

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Before

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Travis

  Before

  Chapter 13

  Before

  2: Break Before

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Before

  Chapter 16

  Before

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Before

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Home

  Before

  Chapter 21

  Before

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Before

  Chapter 24

  Before

  Chapter 25

  Before

  The Call

  3: The Prison Chapter 26

  Before

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Before

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Before

  Chapter 31

  Before

  Chapter 32

  Before

  Daybreak

  Before

  4: Roots Before

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Before

  Chapter 35

  Before

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  The Interview

  Before

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Before

  Chapter 40

  Before

  Missing Hours

  5: The Storm Before

  Chapter 41

  Before

  Chapter 42

  Before

  Chapter 43

  The Stranger

  Before

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Doubts

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Before

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Midwinter Pier

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Waiting Game

  Chapter 53

  BOOK TWO 6: Open Season Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  A New Life

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  The Fix

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Life Raft

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Meetings

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  The Crossing

  7: The Secret Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Identities

  Chapter 68

  Before

  The Back Seat

  8: Freedom Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  A Message

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Out of Hand

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  The Plan

  Chapter 78

  Family

  Chapter 79

  Exorcism

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  9: The Scar Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Tim Weaver is the Sunday Times bestselling author of ten thrillers, including I Am Missing and You Were Gone. Weaver has been nominated for a National Book Award, selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club, and shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library award. He is also the host and producer of the chart-topping Missing podcast, which features experts in the field discussing missing persons investigations from every angle.

  A former journalist and magazine editor, he lives near Bath with his wife and daughter.

  For Camilla

  BOOK ONE

  1

  * * *

  REBEKAH

  1

  She stumbled along the aisle.

  It was so dark, she could barely put one foot in front of the other, her hands out – helping her feel her way forward – her hair soaked, skin slick, clothes matted to her body. When she got halfway down, she stopped and looked back. It was like she was adrift in some vast black ocean.

  The window she’d crawled through hung in the shadows, like a picture frame, glass still ragged along one of its edges, the rest shattered on the floor beneath it. She could hear rain on the roof – a relentless, mechanized rhythm – and see lightning flaring in the sky: whenever that happened, her surroundings would briefly strobe into life, giving her the chance to try to make sense of what was around her. She needed food, a change of clothes. But more than either of those, she needed a mirror and a sewing kit because the blood wasn’t just leaking into her eyes now, it was running all the way down her face.

  Wind shook the bones of the building.

  She was terrified. She was hurt. Worse, she was totally and utterly alone. Just give up. Something tremored in her throat.

  Drop to the floor and give up.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, pushing the voice away, waited until the next fork of lightning, then made a beeline for the back of the room. In the darkness, she fumbled around, knocking things over, but soon had her hand around what she’d been looking for.

  A flashlight.

  She switched it on.

  A dazzling white glow skittered ahead of her and she saw how small the place was: it had seemed massive in the pitch blackness, but it was just thirty feet across.

  She swiped a candy bar from the nearest shelf, ripped open the packaging and took a bite, ravenously hungry. Then, as more blood ran into her eye, she switched her attention to the other side of the room, where boxes of Band-Aids were lined up. It wasn’t until she was right on top of them that she realized there was a first-aid kit too, half hidden at the back of the shelf. It had everything in it she’d need – scissors, antiseptic, sterile dressing, butterfly closures. But no needle and thread.

  Her strength faded – and then something caught her attention close to the counter.

  Fishing equipment.

  Under the glass was a bait needle, on the counter a selection of fishing lines. She scooped up the thinnest thread she could find, plucked a Zippo from next to the cash register, then returned to the first-aid kit.

  Nearby there was a mirror on a rotating stand of sunglasses. She shook off all of the glasses and adjusted the stand so that the mirror was at eye level. Unravelling the fishing line, she fastened it to the needle, then used the scissors from the kit to snip off about six inches of thread. She took a breath and leaned into her reflection, tilting her head, so she could see the wound next to her right eye. She’d glimpsed it in the windshield of her car a couple of hours ago – maybe three, maybe four: she had no idea what time it was now – but the dirt on the glass had helped conceal the severity of the injury.

  Another wave of emotion hit her.

  ‘Why is this happening to me?’ she said softly, her voice barely audible above the rain. She sterilized the end of the needle with th
e Zippo, readying herself for what was coming, but then her eyes filled. Tears mixed with blood, pink trails casting off down her cheeks, like coloured roads on a map.

  She could suture in her sleep, so it wasn’t the idea of stitching her face together that was overwhelming her.

  It was something much worse.

  ‘Please let there be someone else here,’ she sobbed, her words smudged. She raised the needle to her face, her hands shaking. ‘I don’t want to be alone in this place.’

  Before

  Even the dead can talk.

  That was what Rebekah’s father kept telling her at the end. She hadn’t taken much notice at the time. Over those last few months, in her bedside vigil, she’d watched the gradual deterioration of body and mind, an old man, borderline hallucinating, talking about things that made no sense. Where once there had been strength and colour, now her father’s skin was waxy and translucent, an atlas of pale blue veins. He’d become the ghostly inverse of the person who’d brought up the three of them.

  In those moments, Rebekah would hold fast to the image of him before he got ill: their guardian and keeper, the glue that had held them together. He would sometimes allude to the impetuous kid he’d been when he’d shipped out to Vietnam, but it was always hard for Rebekah and her brothers to imagine him that way. Growing up, they rarely saw him lose his temper, and pretty much the only impulsive thing Henry Murphy had ever done had happened before any of them was even born: he’d married a woman he’d known for only four months.

  At the time, he was stationed at RAF Lakenheath, at the US Air Base there, and it was in Cambridge, twenty-seven miles away, that he’d met Fiona Camberwell. She was twenty-four, a village girl who’d never been further west than Peterborough, so she was totally swept up by the idea of being with an American from New York City.

  A year after they got married, Rebekah’s brother Johnny was born. Less than two years later, Rebekah arrived, and soon after that, Henry – following an honourable discharge from the army – became a police officer in the Cambridgeshire Constabulary. He immediately fell in love with the work, even though he was only a bobby.

  But at home things weren’t as good.

  Rebekah’s father rarely elaborated on what had gone on in those final few years, but early on Boxing Day morning in 1985 – as the tinsel caught the glow of the tree, and fairy lights blinked in the windows – Fiona had walked out on them, just a blur of red hair and pale skin. At the time, Johnny was five, Rebekah was three, and their younger brother Mike only eighteen months.

  They would never see their mother again.

  Rebekah watched her father’s coffin being lowered into the ground. The day was dark, almost monochrome, rain somewhere close, its charge in the air. A couple of times, she looked out across the East River, and saw sun breaking through in the distance – but it faded as quickly as it had arrived, a promise unfulfilled, and they were left there, abandoned, staring into the murk of the grave.

  She looked around at the other mourners, at Johnny next to her, at the priest reading monotonously from a Bible. Finally, her eyes went to the parking lot. There was no sign of the Jeep. No sign of Gareth.

  Where the hell was he?

  Beside her, Johnny moved closer, and she felt him take her hand, grasping it in his. Momentarily, she was surprised, unused to such a show of affection from her older brother, but when she glanced at him, he winked at her reassuringly, as if he could see right into her head. ‘He’ll be here, Bek,’ he whispered softly.

  Rebekah gave Johnny’s hand a squeeze in return, unsure if he believed what he was saying, or whether he was simply doing what he always did: insulating her, trying to make things better. He’d been doing it ever since their mother left, but it had become more frequent once they knew their father was terminal, as if Johnny had subconsciously moved into the space that Henry was relinquishing: the patriarch and bulwark.

  Johnny gripped her hand a little tighter and, as the grey morning and last rites came back into focus, Rebekah saw why: a Jeep Cherokee was pulling into the lot next to them.

  She looked at Gareth, seeking him out behind the windshield, and when their eyes met – anger coursing in her veins – she left him in no doubt as to what she thought of his late arrival.

  Her husband looked away.

  2

  Rebekah woke with a start, uncertain for a moment where she was. But then it all pulled into focus: the shelves on either side of her, the debris scattered at her hands and feet. The first-aid kit. The bait needle.

  The general store.

  Getting to her feet, she looked at the smashed window: a rectangle of butter-coloured light was leaking in and across the room. Next to it was a clock on the wall. The last time she’d checked, it was 5 a.m. Now it was nearly ten.

  She’d slept less than five hours.

  The pain in her face had got worse during the night, throbbing in the space next to her eye, flaring in her ear, her cheek, her nose. The fishing line, as thin as it was, had been agony going in, the bait needle even worse. She had antiseptic but nothing to numb the pain of stitching herself back together.

  Nothing to numb the pain of being in this place.

  Alone.

  She moved to the broken window. Using the edge of the counter, she hauled herself up and through, trying to avoid the glass still rooted to the frame. She heard something tear, felt the glass snag her pants, but she managed to wriggle through without puncturing her skin. The previous night, she’d used a dumpster to climb up to the window; this morning, it had rolled away from the wall, propelled by the ferocity of the wind, and her feet flailed as she tried to find a solid platform.

  She dropped onto the dumpster’s lid, then down into a bed of mulched leaves. When she looked around her, it was like the aftermath of an explosion: branches had been torn from the trees, debris from the harbour was scattered everywhere – roof tiles, clapboards, huge lakes of seawater.

  For a moment, as she stood gazing out at the Atlantic, she felt so small, so swamped by the enormity of her situation.

  She was still alive. She was still breathing.

  She’d survived.

  But she was trapped a hundred and one miles of ocean from anywhere.

  The thought dragged at her, made her stumble slightly. And then, as that hit home, something else took hold – more urgent and even more desperate.

  Johnny.

  That was when her eyes landed on the bicycle. It lay on its side outside the store, pretty much exactly where she’d left it the night before. If she was going to find Johnny, she had to go back to the forest: that was where she’d last seen him.

  It was where her Jeep was too.

  She picked up the bike and started pedalling, her stitched wound hurting as she gritted her teeth, pain streaking all the way down the right side of her head. Pretty soon, it became so bad that her vision blurred. She tried to ignore it, cycling hard out of the town, up onto the road that would take her along the southern flank of the island. The further she rode, the colder she got: it dulled the pain in her face, but it turned her fingers to ice, then any patch of exposed skin. A mile, then a second. By the third, with the cold cutting through her like a knife, she realized she was going to need more clothes, quickly.

  Up ahead, a gas station appeared on the left.

  She knew she must be close to the forest because she remembered the gas station being nearby the day before, and the houses opposite, boarded up, swamped by weeds and long grass. Her eyes switched back to the gas station: there was a huge pile of old tyres at its rear, hemmed in by a chain-link fence. She hadn’t seen it the day before but in that pile there might be one that fitted the Jeep.

  She’d come back later.

  For now, all that mattered was Johnny.

  She had to find her brother.

  Before

  After the funeral – after Rebekah had avoided Gareth at the wake so obviously that, eventually, he’d had no choice but to leave – she and Johnny decided to
take their father’s rust-eaten Plymouth Gran Fury for a drive across the Verrazzano Bridge. The plan had been to take it out to Staten Island and then loop back, a journey for old times’ sake, a way to be close to their dad, to something he’d loved, because he’d always loved the Plymouth. But when they got to Staten Island, they decided to keep going.

  They headed down the Parkway to an old motel near Union Beach called the J. It was special to them, a place their father had taken them every summer when they were kids, even though he could barely afford it. Except when Rebekah and Johnny finally got there, the motel was closed – and not just for the day.

  In that moment, as they looked at the derelict building, then at each other, tears filled their eyes. They knew why: there was a strange resonance to the place, a symmetry to this ending, as if the life of the motel had ceased alongside their father’s.

  Back in the car, Rebekah said, ‘Dad kept repeating something weird at the end.’ Johnny glanced at her. ‘“Even the dead can talk.”’

  This time, her brother looked at her like she was losing it.

  ‘That’s what he kept telling me. He said he learned it as a cop.’

  ‘Okay,’ Johnny replied, although it was clear that he remained unconvinced. ‘I might use it in my next book.’

  ‘I’m serious, Johnny.’

  He nodded, as if realizing his comment hadn’t landed. ‘Dad was on his way out, Bek, you know that.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you know how he was. He was mumbling a lot.’

  ‘You really think I misheard? Why would I mishear that?’

  Johnny didn’t say anything, just smiled reassuringly, but she could see the answer in his face. Because we just lost our dad. Because we’re grieving, and we’re hurt, and we’re tired.

  In that moment, on that day, what Johnny had said to her seemed to make sense. But, in the weeks afterwards, she started to think more about what her father had repeated, about what he’d believed, the rules he’d adhered to, and then memories of Rebekah’s mother returned, as they always did eventually. In truth, Rebekah had never stopped thinking about her.