Vanished Read online

  His cheeks coloured. I wasn’t sure if it was anger or embarrassment, and at this point didn’t really care. ‘Yes, of course I do,’ he said, his voice raised for the first time. I left it there to see where it took us – but it didn’t take us anywhere. He peered down into his coffee cup, his thumb and forefinger turning it gently, and then looked up.

  ‘I can’t …’

  ‘Can’t what?’

  His lips flattened again. ‘Who gets to hear this?’

  ‘Gets to hear what?’

  ‘This. This conversation we’re having.’

  ‘Who don’t you want to hear it?’

  He leaned back in his seat and looked around the café. It was quiet now. The mid-morning meetings were over and lunch was yet to come. Behind Wren, the sun reflected in every panel, collecting in a pool on the floor of the foyer below us. The building was air conditioned but Robert Wren had small dots of perspiration all along his hairline.

  His eyes came back to me. ‘About ten, maybe twelve years ago, Sam and I went on a cheapo package deal to Ibiza. Had a week there. We were both single, no ties, just went over to have a bit of fun. One night we were in this club and we’d had an absolute ton to drink, and we got separated. I’d seen him earlier in the night with this girl, really attractive, and they’d been getting on, so I left them to it. I hooked up with another girl, we had a good time …’ He paused, twirled his finger: and the rest of it. ‘Anyway, she left and I went looking for Sam. About five minutes later, I found the girl he’d been chatting to – but she was with some other guy. I asked her where Sam was and she said he’d left in the middle of the evening and never come back. She was pissed off, understandably.’

  He looked around him again, but the nearest people to us were a couple of men on a table on the far side. ‘I looked all over the club but couldn’t find him anywhere, so I went outside. Nothing out front, but around the back – in the car park – I found Sam talking to someone. I was drunk. Annoyed. I’d spent half the evening trying to find him and all the time he was in the bloody car park. So I started over towards him, ready to let him have it, but when I got closer he started kissing this woman, and I thought, “Leave it until the morning. Let him have his fun for tonight.” ’ He brought his coffee towards him, eyes distant, replaying the moment over. ‘Except …’

  ‘It wasn’t a woman.’

  He looked at me, not sure how I’d put it together. ‘Right.’

  ‘It was a man.’

  He nodded. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Was that the first time?’ I asked, sidestepping the question.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you bring it up the next day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He called it a “mistake”. Said he was drunk, didn’t know what he was doing. But it wasn’t much of a lie. We could both see through it. After that, he just … broke down.’

  ‘No one else knew?’

  ‘No. He made me promise not to tell anyone. Not a soul. When he started dating Julia, I had to sit there saying nothing to her, nothing to Mum and Dad before they passed on. They died without even knowing who their son was. Mum would have understood. Dad was more old-fashioned, but he would have come round. I used to have screaming matches with Sam, telling him over and over it wasn’t fair on Julia, on his family, that mostly it wasn’t fair on him. But he was so conflicted. He just didn’t know how to handle it.’

  ‘Did he ever do anything about it?’

  ‘You mean talk about leaving Julia?’

  ‘Or cheat on her.’

  I knew the answer – but I wanted to see if he did.

  ‘He never talked about leaving her,’ he said after a while. ‘I know it sounds weird, but those two were really close. He loved her – maybe not in the way a husband should love his wife, but he still loved her. He was just so confused: he could pretend he was something he wasn’t in front of her, so she didn’t get hurt. But I was like the release valve. When we got together, he let it all come out. I felt so desperately sad for him.’

  ‘So did he cheat on her?’

  They were close, Sam confided in his brother, so I expected Robert Wren to start talking about Ursula Gray. But instead – as he traced a finger across the table, collecting spilt sugar granules into a pile – he didn’t mention her at all. Maybe he didn’t even know.

  ‘One time, I was over in Canary Wharf seeing a client, so I met him for lunch. This must have been, I don’t know, late November – a few weeks before he disappeared. He seemed a bit quiet, but that was how he was sometimes. Not around Julia, but around me. I understood that. I knew what he was trying to process. At the end of the meal, he became quite emotional. Not crying exactly, but everything he said was very heartfelt. He said he loved Julia – just kept saying that over and over – and, as we talked some more, I started to realize it was all born out of guilt. He felt guilty about something. Not just keeping this secret from her, lying to her, but something else.’

  ‘What?’

  He didn’t reply, but I rode out the silence.

  ‘Sam might have been a risk-taker at work, able to put on a front for them, but he wasn’t like that outside. Not with this. He’d spent years – from before I even saw him at that club – pushing these feelings down … and, finally, he did something about it.’

  ‘You mean he’d met someone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He didn’t really give me many details, but I got the subtext.’

  ‘Which was what?’

  Wren coloured a little. ‘He’d paid for a prostitute.’

  I remembered Wellis’s words from earlier: He used our service once. Must have been a month before he left. ‘How did he meet him?’ I asked.

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘Did he tell you the guy’s name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where they met?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When they met?’

  ‘Uh …’ He massaged his brow. ‘I’m pretty sure it was 11 November. I remember I flew out to California for a conference the next day.’

  ‘Did Sam say anything about the guy he met?’

  ‘Not really. I think he might have said the guy was foreign.’

  I set him up with a nice little Albanian kid. Fresh out of the fridge, this kid was. That’s how you want them: young and willing and ready to bend over. I sighed, looking out to the boats, to the people on the edges of the docks. The first man Sam had slept with had been brought into the country in the back of a lorry, against his will. I doubted either of them imagined their lives turning out that way, even if there was a strange kind of symmetry to their meeting: both were prisoners, one of them chained to Adrian Wellis, the other shackled to his own guilt.

  Wrong time, wrong place.

  That was how Wellis described the eventual death of the Albanian kid.

  I turned back to Robert Wren. ‘He definitely never mentioned the guy’s name, or where the two of them met? I need you to think hard about that for me.’

  Wren looked off, to a space behind me, his mind ticking over. ‘He never named the guy or said where he lived, but I do remember him mentioning one thing.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘It was just a …’ His eyes finally came back to me. ‘It was weird. He said the prostitute lived in this place where there were no lights. He said he got to his door, on to the floor this guy was on, and all the bulbs were out. It was completely black. Sam had an iPhone, had some sort of torch app on there, so he got that out and used it to navigate his way along the corridor. And when he got to the flat he said it felt …’ He stopped. ‘He said it felt like someone was there.’

  ‘In the corridor with him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he have a look around?’

  ‘Yes. He said he shone his torch around.’

  ‘And no one was there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So there wasn
’t anyone with him?’

  Wren looked at me and shrugged, and I could read the gesture as clearly as if he’d spoken the words. I guess not. But then, that was who my brother was at the end.

  A tormented, confused man.

  32

  12 March | Three Months Earlier

  Healy tabbed through the next page of search results. It was getting hard to concentrate now. He’d been at it for hours, trying to find any sort of opening. A pinprick, a puncture, however small. But the third victim, Joseph Symons, was just like the others: a man who left nothing of himself, or his kidnapper, as he was pulled away into the dark.

  He leaned back in his seat and looked down to the board where the two faces had become three and the map had been widened further. They all lived in similar places – decaying, decrepit housing estates or tower blocks – and they were all men who weren’t immediately reported missing: single, no ties, no reason for their disappearance to raise any alarms. But, after a while, even the lonely are missed. All three had some friends or some family that started to get concerned by the lack of contact, and all three had been gone between four days and two weeks by the time the pile of hair was found on their pillow. The first victim – Steven Wilky – barely registered as a blip on the radar, but when one of the tabloids got wind of the second, Marc Evans, it became uncontainable. Evans was the son of a respected politician, estranged from his father but not completely out of touch. Twelve hours after the police kicked down the door of his flat, the headline that would define the case ran on the front pages: ‘Invasion of the Body Snatcher’.

  Sleet blew in against the window of the office, sliding down in thin, sludgy trails. Healy watched it, then turned back to the HOLMES data. He tabbed through some more pages, his eyes scanning the locations from which the victims were taken, the approximate times, the lists of worthless trace evidence, fingerprint lifts and fibres. It led nowhere. It all led nowhere.

  ‘Well, well, well.’

  Healy swivelled in his chair. Behind him, Kevin Sallows was perched on the edge of the next desk along eating a cheeseburger. The occupant, a cop called Carmichael, was gone for the day. An amused smile broke out on Sallows’s face, and Healy got a glimpse of partly chewed meat and lettuce.

  Sallows looked at his watch. ‘You clocking overtime, Healy?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, turning back to the data. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Ten o’clock at night – you should be heading home to your good lady wife about now, shouldn’t you?’ Healy felt himself tense, and Sallows picked up on the movement. ‘Oh, sorry. That was insensitive.’

  Healy turned in his seat, all the way around this time.

  Sallows was still smiling. ‘Why are you wasting your time here?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here,’ he said, gesturing to the computer with the half-eaten cheeseburger. ‘You think the rest of us didn’t do our homework?’

  ‘I’m playing catch-up.’

  ‘Fucking right you are. You remember why?’

  Keep in control, he thought. Just keep in control.

  ‘Hello?’

  Healy ignored him.

  ‘What, are you deaf now too?’

  ‘No, I’m not deaf,’ Healy said. ‘I remember why I’m playing catch-up. I was off looking for the piece of shit who killed my daughter, while you were back here with your thumb up Davidson’s arsehole.’

  Sallows’s face dropped. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard what I said.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard,’ Sallows replied, and dropped the rest of the cheeseburger into the bin next to Carmichael’s desk. He stood up. ‘You remember why your girl left?’

  Keep in control.

  ‘No? Well, let me remind you: she left because you punched her mum in the side of the head. You remember that, big man?’

  ‘She didn’t leave because of that.’

  Sallows snorted. ‘Is that a joke?’

  ‘You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Sallows leaned in, meat on his breath, food in his teeth. ‘Face it, Healy, you can’t handle this. You can’t handle the pressure. Those eight-year-old twins got to you so much you ended up putting your missus in a neck brace. You ended up driving your daughter away, into the arms of a fucking psychopath. Doesn’t this’ – he gestured to the incident room – ‘ring any bells for you? This is the same as those girls. Three victims, and we don’t have shit. Nothing. What happens when Craw turns to you and asks you to step up? What’ll happen when you can’t find the answers? You gonna crumble again?’

  Healy felt his muscles harden. He pressed his teeth together, trying to force all the anger out.

  Don’t react. Don’t slip.

  Sallows leaned in to him. ‘Of course you’re gonna crumble, Colm. It’s who you are. It’s what you do. You couldn’t even save your own daughter.’

  In the blink of an eye, Healy was up off his seat, nose to nose with Sallows, pushing forward until Sallows hit the desk behind him. Anger erupted so hard and so fast, Healy’s vision blurred, like a windscreen smeared with rain, and the noise around him became sounds from another room: dim and distant and undefined. ‘You mention her name again,’ he said slowly, his voice trembling, ‘and I will fucking end you.’

  Sallows stared at him.

  And then broke out into a smile.

  He manoeuvred himself away from Healy, and made a point of brushing himself down, as if he’d somehow become contaminated. Then he winked and dropped his voice to a whisper, so no one else in the room could hear it. ‘That’s the Colm we know and love,’ Sallows said gently. ‘And that’s the side of you that’s gonna help us finish you off for good.’

  2 April

  Healy had been waiting five minutes by the time Teresa Reed finally emerged from the High Security Unit. As the pale blue door sucked shut behind her, she headed to a locker about twenty feet away, opened it up and started to fish her things out. She didn’t spot him, didn’t even look round, but even if she had it wouldn’t have made a difference. He’d been watching her for over two months and she barely seemed to notice anything beyond what she had to do. Other people, other lives, they didn’t matter until she ran into them head on.

  As soon as she’d grabbed a canvas bag, tie-dyed and scruffy, a mobile phone and her car keys, she pushed the locker shut and headed out past him. He waited until she’d gone through the main doors and then followed. As he moved outside into the fresh spring air, he thought about what he was doing. Of course you’re gonna crumble, Colm. It’s what you do. He felt fire erupt in his belly and pushed it back down. Fuck Davidson and Sallows. They weren’t important. He’d take care of them, just as he’d take care of Teresa Reed. He’d take care of all of them eventually. But everything needed to be done right.

  He felt around in his coat pocket.

  What he needed was still there.

  Healy picked up speed, scanning the car park for any other signs of life. No one close. That suited him fine. Rain had fallen in the night, so he was careful not to place his feet anywhere they were going to make a sound. He didn’t want her to hear him coming. Not yet.

  Eight feet short of her, she started fiddling around in her handbag for her car keys. They’re in your pocket, you dozy bitch. A few seconds later, she must have realized and felt around in her jacket for them. Her Mini was five cars down, on the right.

  ‘Excuse me!’ Healy called from behind her.

  She looked back over her shoulder, initially unaware she was being spoken to, and then slowing as she saw Healy coming after her. She stopped. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Teresa, right?’

  Her eyes narrowed. She obviously didn’t recognize him at first from their meeting five weeks before. Then it seemed to click. ‘Ah, yes. Uh … Colin?’

  ‘Colm.’

  ‘Colm. Right. You’re the policeman.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He engineered a smile. ‘You recognized me today.’

  She flushed
a little. ‘Yes. Sorry about the last time.’

  He held up a hand in a don’t worry gesture. He reached into his pocket. ‘Here. You dropped this as you left.’ He handed her a small folding umbrella.

  She reached out and took it, a frown on her face. ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘Uh, no. I just …’ Teresa Reed looked up. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  But he knew what she was thinking: I didn’t think I’d brought this with me. And she hadn’t. He’d been to her house and found it outside, in the front garden, next to one of the flowerpots. She must have placed it down there and forgotten to pick it back up.

  ‘Anyway,’ Healy said. ‘Given the weather this week, I thought you might need it. It doesn’t really suit me, to be honest, otherwise I would have kept it for myself.’

  She laughed. ‘Well, thank you.’

  ‘You’re very welcome.’

  Healy rode out the silence, letting her make the next move.

  ‘Well, uh, thanks again,’ she said. ‘Maybe I can buy you a coffee as a thank you or something?’

  He looked enthusiastic. ‘Oh, that would be great.’

  She broke out into another smile, obviously thinking she saw something in Healy: excitement, or anticipation, or relief that she’d finally taken notice of him.

  But it wasn’t like that at all.

  And soon she would find out why.

  33

  Outside Robert Wren’s offices, the day was baking hot and tourists were everywhere. I returned to the car, parked under cover five minutes’ walk away and, in the shade, realized I’d been awake for thirty hours. I could feel myself drift, the pull of sleep strong and comforting. And then, like an alarm clock going off, my phone burst into life. It was a central London number – but not one I recognized.

  ‘David Raker.’

  ‘Mr Raker, it’s PC Brian Westerley here.’