Vanished Read online

  Moving back through the hallway, I padded up the stairs. No creaks. No sound. At the top, in one of the rooms, I could see a loft hatch was open. A ladder had been pulled down and propped against the carpet. The man was halfway up, body inside the loft, legs still on the steps. As I edged in closer, I spotted something else.

  Right on the edge of the loft space.

  Blood.

  I moved quietly into the room and stopped at the bottom of the ladder; more blood was falling from the lip of the hatch. It hit a space about half a foot from where I was standing, forming a pool on the hard, matted fibres of the carpet. The man was just standing there, looking off into the darkness at whatever was up there. Not moving now. Just breathing in and out.

  ‘Ade,’ he said again, but this time there was no purpose in his words, no urgency, and I realized something: he was crying. Soft sounds. Sniffs. ‘Ade,’ he said again.

  I reached up, hands either side of his ankles.

  ‘Ade!’

  He looked down, and saw me. Shock in his face. Then fear. Then anger. I grabbed his ankles and pulled him off the ladder. He fell hard and fast, cracking his head against one of the steps, before landing awkwardly right on the ball of his foot. He yelled out and collapsed. I grabbed him by the collar, got him to his feet and drove him back, into the wall. The wind whistled out of him.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  Tears and blood on his face.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Eric.’

  ‘Eric what?’

  ‘Eric Gaishe.’

  I glanced up, into the loft space. ‘What have you done, Eric?’

  He sniffed. More tears in his eyes.

  ‘I think I killed someone.’

  27

  I pulled Gaishe, hobbling, to the bathroom, pushed him inside and told him to stay put. Then I returned to the spare room. Above me, the loft hatch was a big, black space. I only had a T-shirt on – nothing to cover my skin, nothing to prevent prints – so I grabbed a shirt from a nearby wardrobe, tore it in two and wrapped the material around both hands. I didn’t know what awaited me in the darkness. Not exactly. But, given this house and the people who occupied it, it couldn’t be anything good. As I started to climb, dread slithered through the pit of my stomach.

  Halfway up, a moth escaped from the shadows and, at the lip of the hatch, I could see the full extent of the blood: running along the edges, soaking through into the insulation. Another rung, then another, and suddenly my head was inside the crawl space.

  And I saw her.

  Matted, unwashed hair. Skin stained with a mixture of grease and sweat. The woman was on her stomach, part of her face in a bed of insulation, skeletal arms out either side, legs spread. Her head was tilted towards me, one of her eyes looking up as if she’d been trying to claw her way back out of the loft. And there was blood everywhere: her face, her arms, her ribs, her legs. Thin, painful knife cuts had been used as a torture tactic, not enough to kill her, but enough to subdue her, and the rest was just bruising, everywhere, scattered all over her like spilled ink. There was a brick beside her, coated in her blood. A couple of strikes to the head from Gaishe, and then there would have been nothing but silence. No fight in her any more.

  No life.

  I looked at her: drawn and wan, she couldn’t have been more than eighteen. There were older bruises on her arms and legs, around her collarbone, next to her eyes and hips. I felt anger force its way up, blooming in my chest.

  And then she blinked.

  It was so quick, so unexpected, I wasn’t even sure if I’d seen it. I turned my head and put my ear to her mouth. And I felt it. Soft, warm breath.

  Shit. She’s alive.

  I thought about what I was going to do. But not for long.

  Ultimately, there wasn’t a choice to make.

  Using the house landline, I called for an ambulance, gave them the address and where she was in the house. ‘You’ll need police here too,’ I told them, then hung up. She hadn’t moved from her position in the attic by the time I returned to her, but her visible eye was more alert. It swivelled from left to right, as if she was trying to focus on me.

  ‘It’s okay. You’re going to be all right. This will all be over soon.’ I couldn’t touch her; didn’t want to leave any more evidence than I had already. ‘I need to take care of something, okay? By the time I’m done, the ambulance will be here. You’ll be all right.’

  A gurgle in her throat.

  ‘I promise you’ll be okay.’

  ‘… hmmmm hurrrrrr …’

  ‘You’re safe now.’

  ‘… done lim hurd mm …’

  I started down the ladder – and then stopped.

  Done lim hurd mm. Don’t let him hurt me.

  I looked at her. Her body, her face, painted with blood. ‘I won’t let them hurt you,’ I said. ‘Not Adrian. Not Eric. Not any more.’

  But it seemed to give her no comfort, and then – slowly, inch by inch – she started shaking her head. ‘… nnnnnnn a … is …’

  ‘Try not to move.’

  ‘… no … adrrri … nnnn … no … e …’

  And as she lay there with her life leaking out of her, something unspoken passed between us – and I realized what she was telling me.

  Not Adrian. Not Eric.

  She was talking about someone else.

  I moved down the ladder, wiping each rung clean with the shirt. At the bottom I looked around: what had I touched? I had about seven or eight minutes before the ambulance arrived – maybe a little more if the traffic was bad.

  Downstairs, Wellis was still on the kitchen floor, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He was woozy: when he tried to roll over on to his back, he couldn’t. I left him and wiped down the door frames, door handles and walls.

  Next, I headed back upstairs, one half of the shirt around my hand, one half tucked into the back of my trousers, and opened the bathroom door. Gaishe was inside, perched on the edge of the bath. As soon as I looked at him, I felt the burn in the centre of my chest. ‘Come here, shithead.’ I grabbed him hard by the arm. His face was still streaked with blood and tears and he looked terrified. A man out of his depth, led astray by someone much worse than him. Now he was as deep in as he could get.

  I marched him downstairs and shoved him into the wall at the bottom. He stayed there, just staring off at Wellis, and I realized he was dazed as well as scared.

  I can use that.

  ‘Eric,’ I said. ‘Give me a hand with Adrian. We need to get him out of here before the police arrive.’ He thought he recognized something in my voice – something positive, something he could cling on to – and he came over immediately.

  We hoisted Wellis on to his feet, I cut the duct tape at his ankles and wrists, and tore it away from his mouth. Then I told Gaishe to get me a long coat from Wellis’s wardrobe. He did just as I asked. When he returned, we dressed Wellis in it. I buttoned it, and left Gaishe holding him while I did one last circuit of the house. At the bottom of the ladder I told the woman that she was going to be fine, and that the ambulance was on its way. And then, grabbing the crowbar and the duct tape, we all left.

  Gaishe was on one side, I was on the other, Wellis was in the middle. Gaishe had blood on his face, I had a crowbar and a shirt tucked into the back of my trousers, Wellis had no shirt or shoes on – but it was still early, not even six, and there was no one around. ‘Are you going to help us?’ Gaishe asked as we got to my car.

  ‘Yes,’ I lied, and flipped the boot.

  I glanced up and down the road. No one watching. No one around. I lined Wellis up, his eyes widening as he continually tried to focus, then I pressed his head down and forced him into the back. He folded easily; he still didn’t have the power to fight me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Gaishe said.

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘You’re putting him in there?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And you’re going in too.’
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br />   He frowned, and then I grabbed him by his neck and jammed him down into the space. He climbed in clumsily, hit his knee and his head, but then finally came to rest next to Wellis. They both looked up at me, one dazed, one scared. Rapists. Animals.

  And then I shut them in.

  28

  8 March | Three Months Earlier

  They now had a third photograph to pin to the wall of the incident room. Steven Wilky, Marc Evans and the very latest: a 24-year-old office cleaner called Joseph Symons. He’d been gone eight days by the time his father reported him missing, nine by the time the task force realized they had another victim and had descended on his place in Clerkenwell, a pokey fourth-floor flat in a tower block called Dunkirk House. Healy had given Craw a lift from the station.

  Now they were the only ones left in the apartment.

  The approach to the flat had been in near darkness – the lights in the hallways out, the ones at the entrance too; broken, vandalized – and Healy stood by himself in the bedroom looking at the bed. Forensics had taken the hair from the pillow, fibres from the sheets and trace evidence from the floor, and finally the flat had a strange kind of silence to it. The faint creaks and groans of the walls and floorboards, the drip of rain on the windowsill, but nothing else.

  Healy stepped away from the bed, turned and took in the room. There was no sign of a break-in, which meant – just like Wilky and Evans before him – Symons knew who the Snatcher was. He’d invited him in, maybe innocently, maybe not-so-innocently, but he would have had no idea who he really was, and no sense of what was to come. From there, the case became guesswork. When did the Snatcher strike? How did he suppress his victims? How did he get them out without being seen? Where did he take them? What did he do with them? The press – ravenous, pumped-up and baying for blood – referred to him as a serial killer, but you were only a serial killer if you killed people. All the police had so far were three missing men, all tied together by a single piece of evidence: the hair from their heads, left on their pillows.

  For a moment, sudden and uncontrolled panic hit Healy. What if you can’t find him? What if you haven’t got it in you any more? What if this one breaks you like the one before? He took another step back and reached out to the nearest wall, his mind turning over and over like a trawler being rolled across the waves.

  He remembered Leanne, his daughter; the way she’d looked when he’d found her body, and the road he’d had to walk to get there. And then he remembered the case before that. The one that had ripped his life, and his marriage, apart: two eight-year-old girls raped and killed down in New Cross, and he’d never been able to find the bastard who did it. It had consumed him, completely and utterly suffocated him, until one day it all came out: he discovered his wife was having an affair and he flipped. In a moment of weakness, a moment that was filled with so much shame and regret he could hardly bear the weight of it, he hit his wife.

  Don’t let them see you like this. Don’t show any weakness.

  He stepped away from the wall, breathed in and moved to the window in the bedroom. It looked down across the rain-soaked front entrance of the tower block. In a patch of darkness out towards the main road, he could see flashbulbs going off, and cones of light where TV reporters were broadcasting live. Off to the left, where a thin walkway connected this building with the next, people watched, gloved hands on the railing, breath forming above their heads like balls of gauze.

  ‘You all right?’

  He looked around. DCI Melanie Craw was standing in the doorway of the room, head tilted, eyes analysing him. She’d given him his chance, made an unpopular decision, and for that he owed her. But she still looked at him like all the others did: waiting for the moment he said something or did something stupid; the moment he screwed it all up. And sometimes her gaze was even more intense than that: sometimes it felt she was looking right into his head, reading his every thought, and he became worried that she’d figured out what he was doing at the prison.

  ‘There’s no sign of forced entry anywhere?’ Healy asked.

  Craw stepped into the bedroom. ‘No. Symons is just like Wilky and Evans. Our suspect is definitely invited in. Most likely he follows them, gets to know their routines, then initiates a meeting and gains their trust.’

  ‘And when he gets inside the flats, he drugs them.’

  ‘That seems the most likely course of action, yes.’

  ‘Because how else does he shave their heads, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But what about once they’re drugged?’

  She looked at him, seeing that he had a theory. ‘He leaves with them.’

  ‘But there have been no witnesses at any of the scenes. So, how do you carry a grown man like Symons out of a fourth-floor flat without raising any suspicion?’

  Craw shrugged. ‘You wait for the right moment.’

  ‘Or you don’t knock them out.’

  She stepped closer, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I agree that he drugs them,’ Healy replied. ‘It makes them much easier to control that way. There’s no way they would allow him to shave their heads otherwise. But I don’t think they’re unconscious while he’s doing it. In fact, I don’t think they’re unconscious at any point. Wilky, Evans, Symons – I think he gave them enough so they were malleable – and then I think he walked them right out the front door. And he’ll do exactly the same to the next one.’

  Date Night

  It had been a long time. As Jonathan Drake waited in his flat, perched on the arm of a sofa, the TV on in the background, he tried to remember how long. Maybe a year. Maybe more. You lost track after a while.

  He didn’t mind dating, he didn’t mind meeting new people, but he hated the build-up. He hated the early stages, the moments where you initiated conversation in the hope they wouldn’t automatically turn you down, and then the weeks after, where everything was about making an impression, about saying the right things at the right times. None of it came easily to him. He wasn’t asocial – quite the opposite, in fact – but the process was never one he’d been 100 per cent comfortable with, ever since he was a teenager. Chatting people up in nightclubs, at bars, at house parties, it all just felt so false. Because of that, for a long time he couldn’t be bothered with it. He didn’t want the embarrassment. He spent months actively avoiding dating and, after a time, became very comfortable with his decision. He even grew to quite like it. He could go out with friends, with the people he worked with, and not feel under any pressure. He watched everyone else ride the tidal wave of men and women, in clubs, in bars, and it gave him a great perspective on how empty and unsatisfying that lifestyle was. But eventually, everyone – even those for whom detachment becomes second nature – starts to feel the ache of loneliness. And a year later, he realized something: humans weren’t meant to be alone. They needed company.

  So here he was.

  He’d met this one by chance, while walking home, and they’d continued chatting on their daily commute. Drake preferred it that way. When you met someone unexpectedly, you sidestepped the really inelegant moments, the uncomfortable ‘Do you come here often?’-style conversation, because you weren’t expecting anything to happen. And then it was easier to move to the next stage: where both of you liked the look of each other, and you gradually started to develop some kind of bond. He was nervous, but he was excited too about what the evening had in store for them.

  Getting to his feet, he padded back through to the bedroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He was five-eight, slight, not handsome exactly – he knew that much – but rugged and dark. He had tiny pockmarks in and around the slope of his nose, running in an arc at either cheekbone, but it was the only part of him he disliked.

  He turned and looked around at his flat.

  Thin, worn carpets, faded wallpaper, damp in the corners of the room. Off to the right, in the kitchen, he could see a watermark had stained the cream linoleum. There were no pictures anywhere. No plants. No d
ecor of any kind apart from a bookshelf full of books, and a TV perched on top of a wheeled cabinet. He’d have liked a better flat, but he was pretty philosophical about it: the rent was cheap, and there was no one else to help pay it. Until he got a promotion at the store, or won the lottery, this would do fine.

  A knock at the door.

  Drake studied himself in the mirror again. ‘Come on, Jonny Boy,’ he said. ‘This could be the one. This could be the start of something good. Time to turn on the charm.’ He stood there for a moment more, brushing himself down and smiling at the fact he was giving his own reflection a pep talk, and then he headed across the flat to the door. Before opening up, he looked out through the peephole. His date looked a little different than he remembered: somehow slightly older, but cleaner cut and better-looking. It was difficult to make out too much more: a bunch of youths had been through the hallway a couple of days before and smashed all the light bulbs for no other reason than they could.

  He unlocked the door and pulled it open.

  ‘Leon,’ Drake said.

  ‘Hello,’ Leon Spane replied. ‘How are you doing, Jon?’

  Drake held out his hand. ‘I’m good. You?’

  ‘Really good, thanks,’ Spane said, smiling.

  They shook. Spane had big hands, but they were cool and clammy, and in a weird kind of way, Drake was pleased. Maybe he’s as nervous as me, he thought, and then he invited Spane in. Spane thanked him with another smile, and stepped past, into the flat.

  ‘I like your bag,’ Drake said.

  Spane brought the satchel he was carrying around to his front, as if he’d never thought to look before. ‘Oh. Thank you. I’m a bit of an eBay addict.’ He paused, as if he’d noticed the rest of what he was wearing. ‘I might need you to give me a few fashion tips, actually. I remember you said you worked in fashion.’