reading

Author’s Note

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

PART TWO

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Date Night

PART THREE

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

PART FOUR

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Daddy

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

PART FIVE

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

15 June

Healy looked down at the temperature readout as he pulled up outside the estate. Almost twenty degrees. It felt hotter than that. He’d had the air conditioning on all the way from the station but, on the journey over, nothing had cooled. His sleeves were rolled up, his top button undone, but the car was still stifling. Even in the middle of the night, under cover of darkness, the heat continued to cling on.

He paused, looking out through the windows of the Mercedes to the maze of broken homes beyond. The most dangerous housing estate in London had gone into hibernation. There were no lights on in the flats, no kids in the alleys, no gangs crossing the walkways between buildings. But then, as more marked cars arrived, lightbars painting the ten-storey slabs of concrete, he could make out shapes in the night, watching him from darkened windows and doorways.

He got out. Away to his left, the media were encamped behind a strip of police tape, in shirts and summer dresses, faces slick with sweat. It was mayhem. Journalists jostled for the best position. Feet slid on grass banks. Noise. Lights. Voices screaming his name. In another life, he might have enjoyed the celebrity. Some cops did. But when he looked at the entrance to the building, ominous and dark, like a mouth about to swallow him up, he realized it was all a trick. This wasn’t celebrity. This was standing on a precipice in a hurricane. They were behind him now; with him on that precipice. But if it went on any longer, if it got any worse, if the police still hadn’t found the man responsible by the time the media were camped out at the next crime scene, all they’d be trying to do would be to feed him to the darkness beyond.

He moved across the concrete courtyard to the entrance and looked inside. Everything was broken or cracking, like the whole place was about to collapse under its own weight. The floor was slick with water, leaking from somewhere, and along the corridor a broken door, leading into the first set of flats, was hanging off its hinges. Litter was everywhere. Some people would go their whole lives without seeing the insides of a place like this: a two-hundred-apartment cry for help. The sort of place where even the night at its darkest wasn’t black enough to hide all the bruises.

A uniformed officer with a clipboard was standing at the bottom of a stairwell to Healy’s right. He looked up as Healy approached, shining a flashlight in his direction. ‘Evening, sir.’

‘Evening.’

‘The elevator doesn’t work.’

Healy glanced at the lift. Across its doors was a council notice telling people it was unsafe to use. On the damp, blistered wall next to it, someone had spray-painted an arrow and the words ‘express elevator to hell’.

After showing the officer his warrant card, Healy headed up three flights of stairs, most of it barely lit. Everything smelled like a toilet. Glass crunched under his shoes where light bulbs had been deliberately smashed and never cleared away. At the third-floor landing, people started to emerge – other cops, forensics – a line snaking out from Flat 312. A crime-scene tech broke off from dusting down a door frame to hand Healy a white paper boiler suit and a pair of gloves. ‘You’d better wear this,’ she said. ‘Not that you’re going to be disturbing much evidence.’

Healy took the suit.

Inside the flat, a series of stand-alone lights had been erected, their glare washing into the corridor. Apart from the buzz of a generator, the apartment was pretty much silent. The occasional click of a camera. A mumble from one of the forensic team. Brief noises from other flats. Otherwise, nothing.

After zipping up the boiler suit and pulling up the hood, Healy moved into the flat. It was just like the ones the other victims had lived in. Run-down. Squalid. Damp. In the kitchen, which led off from the living room, a big brown watermark had formed on the linoleum. Healy spotted DCI Melanie Craw looking around inside. There was a door off the living room, opening on to a bedroom. Chief Superintendent Ian Bartholomew stood in the doorway, the bed in front of him. He looked back at Healy, a pissed-off expression on his face, then to Craw, who’d arrived from the kitchen.

‘Melanie,’ he said. ‘What the bloody hell am I supposed to tell the media?’

Bartholomew backed out of the bedroom and let Healy take it in. The crime scene. A small bedroom with a tiny walk-in closet, a dresser, and a television on a chair in the corner of the room. The carpet was worn, the wallpaper peeling. On the pillow, placed in a neat pile, was the victim’s hair. He’d shaved it all off, just like all the others, and left it there. The mattress was where the body should have been.

But that was just the problem.

He never left the bodies.

1

12 June

Her office was on the top floor of a red-brick four-storey building just off Shaftesbury Avenue. The other floors belonged to an advertising agency and a big international media company. Two code-locked glass doors protected sharp-suited executives from the outside world, while a security guard the size of a wrestler watched from inside. Everything else in the street was either dead or dying. Two empty stores, one a shoe shop, one an antiques dealer, had long since gone. Adjacent to that was a boarded-up Italian restaurant with a huge NOW CLOSED sign in the window. The last man standing was a video rental store that looked like it was on its way out: two men were arguing in an empty room with only a single DVD rack and some faded film posters for company.

It was a warm June evening. The sun had been out all day, although somewhere out of sight it felt like rain might be lying in wait. I’d brought a jacket, just in case, but for the moment I was in a black button-up shirt, denims and a pair of black leather shoes I’d bought in Italy. They were the genuine article, from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, but I didn’t wear them much; mostly their purpose in life was to cut my feet to shreds. Yet they were a sacrifice worth making for the woman I was meeting.

Liz emerged from one of the elevators in the foyer about fifteen minutes later. People had been filing out of the building steadily since five, but the office she worked in was also the office she ran, so she tended to be the last one out. She spotted me immediately, standing in the doorway of the now-defunct antiques shop, and I was struck by how beautiful she looked: dark eyes flashing as she smiled, long, chocolate hair pulled back from a face full of natural angles. Elizabeth Feeny, solicitor advocate, had thrived in a city packed with dominant males: she’d gone up against bigger fish and won; she’d taken their clients and retained them; she’d brought together a team of formidable lawyers under the umbrella of Feeny & Company and she’d fronted a number of high-profile cases that had secured her growing reputation. It would have been difficult not to be impressed by her, even if I hadn’t been seeing her for eight months and living next door to her for a lot longer. She completely looked the part, moving across the road towards me in a white blouse and black pencil skirt that traced the gentle curves of her body. But her biggest asset was that when she smiled, she made you feel like the only person in the room. That was a useful skill when you were pacing the floor of a court.

‘Mr Raker,’ she said, and kissed me.

‘Elizabeth.’

She gave me a gentle slap – she hated being called Elizabeth – and I brought her into me and kissed her on the top of the head. ‘How was your day?’ I asked.

‘Full of meetings.’

We stayed like that for a moment. This was new for both of us. It had been two and a half years since my wife Derryn had died of breast cancer, and almost sixteen since we’d first met. Liz was married at twenty-one, pregnant six months later and divorced shortly after that. She spent two years bringing up her daughter Katie, before returning to the law degree she’d started and completing her training as a solicitor. She hadn’t dated seriously since before she’d married her husband.

‘Where are we eating?’ she asked.

‘There’s an Italian place I know.’ I shifted us – still together – around to face the closed restaurant just down from where we were standing.

She squeezed me. ‘You’re a funny man, Raker.’

‘I booked us a table at a South African place just off Covent Garden. We can get drunk on Castle Lager.’

‘South African?’

‘Ever had babotie?’

‘Can’t say I have.’

We started walking slowly. ‘Well, tonight’s your lucky night.’

The restaurant was in a narrow cellar in a side street between Covent Garden market and the Strand. The stone walls had holes carved in them, framed photographs of South Africa sitting inside. In the one closest to us, the Ferris wheel at Gold Reef City was caught in black and white, frozen for a moment against a markless sky. I’d spent a lot of time in and around Johannesburg in my previous life as a journalist, and been stationed there for a year in the run-up to the elections in 1994. It had been a different place back then, more like a war zone than a city, its people massaged by hatred and fear.

Liz let me choose, so I ordered two bottles of Castle, peri-peri chicken to start and babotie – spiced mincemeat, baked with egg – for the main course. While we waited for the food to arrive, she talked about her day and I told her a little of mine. I’d just put a case to bed a couple of days before: a seventeen-year-old runaway who’d been hiding out close to Blackfriars Bridge. His parents, a couple from a sprawling council estate in Hackney, had told me that they only had enough money to cover my search for three days. It took me five to find him, the job complicated by the fact that he had no friends, talked to pretty much no one, and, when he’d left, had literally taken only the clothes on his back. No phone. No cards. No money. Nothing even remotely traceable. I’d been to see his mum and dad and told them to pay me for the three days, and then return when they felt they could afford to square up the extra two. They were good people, but I wouldn’t see them again. I wasn’t normally in the business of charity, but I found it even more difficult to leave things unfinished.

After the babotie arrived, conversation moved on from work to Liz’s daughter and the university course she was doing. She was finishing the final year of an economics degree. I hadn’t had the chance to meet her yet, but from the way Liz had described her, and the photos I’d seen, she appeared to be almost a mirror image of her mother.

I ordered two more bottles of Castle and, as Liz continued talking, caught sight of a woman watching me from across the restaurant. As soon as we made eye contact she looked down at her food. I watched for a moment, waiting for her eyes to drift up to me a second time, but she just continued staring at her plate, picking apart a steak. I turned back to Liz. Ten seconds later, the woman was looking at me again.

She was in her late twenties, red hair curling as it hit her shoulders, freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose. She had a kind of understated beauty, as if she didn’t realize it, or she did but wasn’t bothered enough to do anything about it. The thin fingers of her right hand grasped a fork; those on her left were wrapped around the neck of a wine glass. She was wearing a wedding ring.

‘You okay?’

The woman was looking away again now, and Liz had noticed me staring at her. ‘The woman in the corner there – do you know her?’

Liz looked back over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘She keeps looking this way.’

‘Can’t say I blame her,’ Liz said, smiling. ‘You’re a good-looking man, Raker. Not that I want to inflate your ego or anything.’

We carried on eating. A couple of times I glanced in the woman’s direction, but didn’t catch her eye again. Then, about thirty minutes later, she suddenly wasn’t there any more. Where she’d been sitting was empty; just a half-finished steak and a full glass of wine. Money sat on a white tray on the edge of the table, the bill underneath it.

She was gone.

2

Just before we left, Liz got a call from a client. She rolled her eyes at me and found a quiet spot in an alcove. I gestured to her that I’d meet her upstairs when she was done.

The rain that had been in the air earlier had now arrived. I pulled my jacket on and found shelter a couple of doors down from the restaurant. Across the street people emerged from Covent Garden Tube station, a few armed with umbrellas and coats, but most dressed in short sleeves or T-shirts, blouses or summer skirts. After about five minutes I spotted a figure approaching me from my left, moving in the shadows on the opposite side of the street. When she got close, the light from a nearby pub illuminated her, freeze-framing her face, and I realized who it was.

The woman from the restaurant.

She crossed the street and stopped about six feet away.

‘Mr Raker?’

I immediately recognized the look in her eyes. I’d seen it before, constantly, repeated over and over in the faces of the families I helped: she’d either lost someone, or felt she was about to. Her face was young, but her eyes were old, wearing every ounce of her pain. It gave her a strange look, as if she was caught somewhere in between, neither young nor old, not beautiful or ugly. Just a woman who had lost.

‘I’m really sorry I had to come up to you like this,’ she said, and pushed her hair behind her ears. She seemed nervous, her voice soft but taut. ‘My name’s Julia. Julia Wren.’

‘What is it you want, Julia?’

‘I, uh …’ She paused. A bag strap passed diagonally across her chest. She reached behind her and pulled it around, opening up the front flap. She took out her purse and removed a piece of paper from it. As she unfolded it, I could immediately see what it was: a printout. ‘I read about you,’ she said. ‘On the internet.’

It was a BBC story, a photograph showing me being led out of a police station, flanked by a detective, two uniforms and my legal counsel, Liz. Three days before the picture had been taken, I’d gone right into a nest of killers and almost lost my life. Eighteen months had passed since then, but my body was still marked by the scars.

There had been other stories on the same case. Many other stories. I’d given no interviews, even to the people I’d once worked with, who’d called begging for comment. But it had gone big. For a week it had played out in the nationals until, like all news stories, it eventually burned itself out. For everyone else, it was consigned to history.

But not for this woman.

‘Have you been following me for long, Julia?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

I believed her: I’d spotted her straight away in the restaurant, and seen her the second she started to approach me. If she’d been following me for any length of time, it wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Tailing was an art. If you followed someone, you had to stay invisible at the same time.

‘I’ve read about you,’ she continued, nodding at the printout. ‘I mean, you can see that. I read about what you did when you found that place up north. How they tried to hurt you. What …’ She stopped, looking down at the scars on my fingers. ‘What they did to you. Then I saw another story about you in the papers last year. To do with that man the police found. The one who took those women. When I saw those stories, I thought, “That’s a man who can help me.” ’

‘Help you?’

‘Do you believe in fate?’

I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t.’

That seemed to stop her in her tracks. But then she found her feet again. ‘I saw you and your …’ Her eyes drifted to the restaurant. ‘Your friend. I saw you walk past me. The man I’d read about on the internet. So when you passed me I couldn’t help but see it as fate. And I suppose I lied a little. I did follow you – but only after I saw you tonight. I followed you to the restaurant because I wanted to be sure it was you. And when I saw that it was, I realized I needed to speak to you.’

‘What do you want, Julia?’

‘I want you to find my husband,’ she said, pausing and kneading her hands together. For a moment she seemed to shrink into the shadows: head bowed, shoulders hunched, protecting herself in case I turned her away. ‘Six months ago he got on to the Tube at Gloucester Road. And he never got off again.’

3

Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in a café on Long Acre. Liz had taken my car and gone home, doing a good job of disguising her curiosity. She’d seen enough in the eight months we’d been dating to know this wasn’t how it normally worked. I liked some sort of plan in place before I met the families; liked to know who they were, and where they were coming from. But, with Julia Wren, there was no plan. She was a blank.

We ordered coffees and sat at the window, neon signs smeared in the drizzle, the sky black and swollen. She laid the printout on the table, manicured hand across it as if scared it might blow away. Often, they were caught halfway between expectation and fear: expectation that this might be the moment their loved ones came home; fear that it would be in a body bag.

She glanced at me, tucking a cord of red hair behind her ear. I couldn’t tell yet if she was naturally timid or just nervous. ‘I read that you used to be a journalist.’

‘In a past life.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘It definitely had its moments.’

‘You got to travel, I expect.’

‘I got to see a lot of the world, but it was more like a busman’s holiday.’ I smiled. ‘With added warzones.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘The States on and off for five years. South Africa before and after the elections. Israel and Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan.’

‘You must have seen some things.’

An image formed in my head: running for my life through a South African township, bullets ripping holes through the air, bodies scattered across the road, blood in the gutters, dust and debris and screams of pain. ‘Let’s just say you gain an appreciation of what people are capable of.’

She paused. Rocked her head from side to side as if sizing up her next question. I knew what was coming. ‘Did you give it up because of your wife?’

‘Yes.’ I didn’t offer anything more. ‘Why don’t you tell me about your husband?’

She nodded and produced a photograph from her bag. ‘This is Sam.’

He was in his late twenties, had bright blue eyes, fair hair and a nose that seemed too big for his face. He was unusual-looking, but not unattractive. In the picture he was dressed in a black suit and red tie, and standing in the front room of a house. At a guess, he looked about five-nine, but a little underweight. The suit didn’t fit, and there were minor hollows in his cheeks where his skin seemed like it was pulled too tight. I made a note to ask her about that later: people were underweight either because they were ill, weren’t eating enough – or had something to worry about.

‘When was this taken?’

‘Six months ago. Tenth of December.’

I pulled the photograph in closer. There was a Christmas tree reflected in one of the windows. ‘How long after this did he disappear?’

‘He was gone six days later.’ She paused. ‘The sixteenth.’

About two hundred and fifty thousand people went missing every year in the UK, and while two-thirds of them were kids under eighteen, the next commonest group was men between the ages of twenty-four and thirty. Sam Wren was a perfect fit for the statistics. The reasons why adult men went missing were often predictable – relationships, financial issues, alcoholism, mental illness – but the resolutions normally weren’t. Many were reported missing long after they’d disappeared, when it was impossible to pick up the trail. And even if that wasn’t the case, even if they were reported missing within a day or two, they had often planned their escapes in advance, given thought to their route out, and had a fair idea of how to cover their tracks. Sam had been gone six months and, as I looked at the photograph, I imagined – at the moment it was taken – he’d already firmed up his exit strategy.

I gestured towards the picture. ‘Tell me about the day he disappeared.’

She nodded but then paused. This is where it started, where it began to unravel, where the road split, and eventually she was either lying next to him in bed again or standing over him in a morgue.

‘He left a little earlier than normal,’ she said, starting quietly. ‘Usually he was gone by about 7.20, 7.30. That day, it was 7, 7.10.’

‘Any reason why?’

‘He just said he had a lot of work on. That wasn’t unusual. He’d often head off at that time on the days he knew were going to be busy.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He worked for an investment bank in Canary Wharf. He advised people on where to put their money – stock, shares, that kind of thing.’

‘Which company was that for?’

‘It’s called Investment International. I2 for short. It was set up a few years back by a guy Sam worked with at J. P. Morgan. They’d been to university together. Sam had originally gone into the graduate programme at HSBC but never really liked it, so his friend helped him make the move to JPM, and then got him involved at I2 as soon as it got off the ground.’

‘Was the company doing okay?’

She rocked her head from side to side. ‘Not great. They’re a relatively small company, so the recession hit them pretty hard. Sam’s wages were frozen at the end of 2010, and so were his bonuses.’

‘Did he still like his job, despite that?’

‘It was a bit stressful, but I’d say he liked it about as much as any of us like our jobs. He’d come home sometimes and tell me he’d had enough of it, but the next day – if things went well – he’d be completely different. I didn’t really look harder than that, to be honest. We all have ups and down, bad days and good days.’

I glanced at the photo of Sam again: the gaunt, thin features, the suit hanging off him, a faint look of disquiet in his face. Maybe there were more bad days than good.

‘So, he didn’t seem any different the day he disappeared?’

‘No. And, if he was, it was so subtle I missed it.’

‘You two were getting on okay?’

‘Fine,’ she said, eyes flicking to the window and then back to me. She didn’t elaborate. Instead she just sat there, looking for me to pick up the conversation and move it forward, the muscle tone changing at the side of her face; tighter and more rigid, like she was clenching her teeth.

Did you just lie to me?

I let it go for the moment, and decided to come back to it when I had a better feel for who she was and why she might sidestep the question.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Half a mile from Gloucester Road Tube station,’ she said. ‘We bought a place in a little mews about five years back. This was when Sam used to get bonuses.’

‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’ But there was a forlorn expression on her face now, like she didn’t want to be living alone in a house they’d bought as a couple. ‘I used to be the manager at a deli in Covent Garden, so most days, as long as he wasn’t too swamped with work, we’d walk to the Tube together.’

‘You don’t work at the deli any more?’

‘I was made redundant in March last year.’ She paused; and then her cheeks started to colour, as if she thought she’d second-guessed me. ‘Don’t worry: I’ll have enough to pay you. I’ve got another job now, at a restaurant in Bayswater. I’ve got some savings; money we kept for a rainy day. I figure this is the day we were talking about.’

‘I wasn’t worried about the money,’ I said.

But she just nodded.

‘How long were you unemployed?’

‘Almost eleven months.’

‘So you started working again early this year – January time?’

‘January the sixteenth.’

Thirty-one days after her husband disappeared. I wondered, for a moment, how that must have felt: starting a new career, a new part of your life, while the biggest part of your old one had vanished into thin air.

‘How did you both cope financially during the time you were out of work?’

She shrugged. ‘Sam’s bonus helped buy that place, but we’d still been lumbered with a massive mortgage, even by London standards. Suddenly we were in a situation where his wages had been frozen, he wasn’t bringing home anything extra and I wasn’t bringing home anything at all. You can cut out the restaurants and the clothes and the weekends away, but you can’t do without your home. Defaulting on our mortgage was the thing that worried us the most.’

‘What about now?’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Can you pay the mortgage on your own?’

‘Sam didn’t take any money with him the day he disappeared, and he hasn’t taken any out since. So my rainy-day fund will last me another three or four months.’

‘And after that?’

A humourless smile. ‘Well, I guess I’ve just got to hope you find him.’

If she thought finding her husband would solve all their problems, she was going to be disappointed. If he’d gone for a reason, he’d purposefully removed himself from his marriage, his job and his life. There was no instant fix. If I found him, if he was even alive, things would never be the same as they were before.

I changed direction. ‘So, his commute was Gloucester Road to Westminster and then change to the Jubilee? Or did he get the DLR from Tower Hill?’

‘He changed at Westminster.’

‘The Circle or District?’

‘Circle.’

‘He never got the District?’

‘Rarely.’

‘Why?’

‘One of the reasons he left HSBC was because he didn’t really like the guys he was working with there. It wasn’t any massive conflict of interest, more that Sam just couldn’t take to them, and the way they worked. You know how you meet some people in life who, from minute one, you just know you aren’t going to see eye to eye with?’

I nodded.

‘That’s why he started looking for a way out of there, and that’s why he ended up moving to JPM to work with his friend from university.’ She looked at me, and could see the question in my face: Yeah, but why did he never get the District line? ‘Three of them lived in Wimbledon,’ she said.

‘So they used to get the District line.’

‘Right.’

‘But the chances of them bumping into each other must have been minimal.’

She shrugged. ‘Sam got into a routine with the Circle.’

‘Do you think these guys had anything to do with Sam’s disappearance?’

She shook her head: absolute certainty. ‘No. It wasn’t anything serious. They just rubbed each other up the wrong way and it started making Sam unhappy.’

I noted that down. ‘When did you report him missing?’

‘The evening of 16 December. He never came home, I couldn’t get him on his mobile, and his boss had left a message on our answerphone wondering where he was.’

‘He hadn’t turned up for work at all?’

‘No.’

‘You went to the police?’

‘Yes. They were pretty thorough: wanted to know about his friends, relatives, his medical history, his financial details. They came to look around the house too, and even took away his toothbrush to get a DNA sample. When I told them that he hadn’t turned up to work, the officer said he’d check the CCTV footage from the stations too.’

‘But he didn’t find anything?’

‘No. He called and said they were in the process of requisitioning the CCTV footage from the Tube. A couple of weeks passed and I heard nothing. So, I chased him up and he returned my call a few days later. He said they hadn’t found anything.’

‘At all?’

‘He said Sam didn’t get off the train again.’

‘And that didn’t bother him?’

There was a bleakness in her face. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What was the guy’s name?’

‘PC Westerley. Brian Westerley.’

They weren’t exactly bringing out the big guns for Sam’s disappearance, but then he wouldn’t have raised many flags at the Met: a man in his late twenties, good job, solid marriage, just about in the black, no history of mental illness. There wasn’t an obvious reason for him to go missing, which meant more manpower and more resources would be needed to find him. I’d seen the full force of the police emerge in the aftermath of a disappearance on another case, when a seventeen-year-old girl vanished into the ether. But she’d ticked three big boxes: white, female and a minor. Sam was different, his circumstances different. There was no media pressure and no headlines. The Met had palmed off his case on a PC, and it had been allowed to drift.

Despite that, there was still one massive question mark over this whole thing: how exactly did a man get on to a train and never get back off again? It might not have bothered Westerley enough to pursue it to its conclusion, but it bothered me.

‘I’ll call Westerley and see what he says.’

‘I hope he’s helpful.’

I doubt he will be. The last thing the police wanted was an outsider sniffing around trying to solve one of their cases, even if it was a low-priority one like Sam Wren. A detective I used a lot during my days as a journalist used to have a shelf in his filing system marked ‘DGAS’; as in ‘Don’t Give a Shit’. That was where the low-priority missing people, the drug addicts and the repeat offenders got stashed and forgotten about. But I’d never met a cop who didn’t start giving a shit the minute an outsider stepped into view.

‘Does Sam have any family?’

‘A brother. Robert.’

‘Is he here in London?’

‘He works here. But he lives in Reading.’

‘I’ll need his address,’ I said.

She reached into the handbag and brought out a diary. She’d prepared for this day; prepared for the questions I was going to ask. She leafed through it, found the page she was looking for and then ripped it out of the book. She set it down in front of me. It was a list of names – numbered 1 to 15 – of the most important people in Sam’s life. Each name had full contact details.

‘That’s everybody I could think of,’ she said.

Each name had an entry after it, headed ‘Relationship to Sam’. His brother was top, followed by friends and work colleagues. ‘This’ll work,’ I said, smiling.

‘If I think of anyone else, I’ll let you know.’

I folded the piece of paper up. ‘I’ll need to have a look around the house.’

She nodded. ‘Whenever you need to.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘I’m working the morning shift. I’ll be home about two.’

‘I’ll be there for three.’ She gave me the address and I noted it down. ‘Can I take this?’ I asked her, and touched a finger to the photograph of her husband.

‘Of course.’

I nodded my thanks and pulled it towards me. Part of the reason for going to the house – apart from the fact that it was one of my routines; a way to understand the person better – was to find out if there were any older photographs of him. I wanted to see how he looked; if he had always been as thin as he was at the end.

My watch beeped gently. Eleven o’clock.

‘One last thing before I go,’ I said. Outside the rain had stopped and with it had come a strange kind of silence. No drizzle drifting against the window any more, no people passing in the street. She studied me expectantly. ‘If I start looking into this, there can’t be any secrets between us.’

Her eyes flicked to her coffee cup and up again. ‘Secrets?’

‘Any secrets, any conflicts that existed between the two of you, any problems Sam might have been having, I need to know about them. I’m not here to make a judgement on you. I’m here to find Sam.’

I let that sit there for a moment.

But she didn’t take the bait.

If she was lying to me, the lie would surface eventually. They always did. Usually families lied out of some misguided belief that it might affect how I did my job; as if my performance was based on how picture-perfect their life was. But the truth was, no life was perfect. Everyone had secrets.

It’s just some were buried deeper than others.

4

I walked Julia Wren back down Long Acre and then watched her disappear into the Tube station at Covent Garden. The streets were starting to empty now, the noise drifting away, a different, softer city emerging from the shadows. I took out my phone and thumbed through the address book until I got to the name I wanted: Ewan Tasker.

‘Task’ was in his early sixties, retired for a couple of years but still employed in an advisory role at the Met. Before that, he worked for the National Criminal Intelligence Service, the precursor to the Serious Organised Crime Agency. Our relationship had started off slowly: he’d come to me with a story he wanted to break about Kosovan organized crime, hoping to force one of its leaders out into the open; I used it as a bargaining chip, and a way to secure him as a long-term source. We sparred for a while but eventually, over time, became good friends. These days, I wasn’t able to offer him column inches in return for his help, so he made me turn up to a charity golf day once a year on his birthday. For me, it was eighteen holes of misery. For him, it was hilarious.

‘Raker!’ he shouted down the phone. ‘What time do you call this?’

It was late, but I knew he’d be awake. Task enjoyed his golf, but he wasn’t built for retirement: he’d spent the first six months driving his wife up the wall, and the next six on bended knee begging any agency he could find to give him something to do.

‘How you doing, old man?’

‘I’m good. Up to my arse in work, but otherwise good.’

‘I’m not sure lifting beer cans to your mouth counts as work, Task.’

He laughed. ‘I didn’t even have time for a pint at the clubhouse this morning, and you know I always make time for a pint or ten.’

‘I thought you were just advising the Met part-time?’

‘I am. Normally it’s more sedate: meetings once a week at Scotland Yard, the rest of the time here at home reading up on cases and offering my devastating insight.’

‘But not this week?’

‘There’s a few things going on,’ he said, ‘but nothing exciting. Not yet, anyway. You been following this Snatcher stuff?’

‘Not closely.’

‘You’re losing your touch, Raker.’

I smiled. ‘If I ever had it. I only know what I’ve read in the papers: he gets inside their houses and takes them from their beds.’

‘Yeah,’ Tasker said. ‘He’s got some balls, I’ll give him that.’

‘You’re not working that case, are you?’

‘No. Definitely not my area. But it’s the water-cooler case at the Met: everyone’s talking about it, everyone’s got an opinion. The press are all over it like flies on shit.’

‘Can’t blame them. It’s the biggest story of the year.’

‘Spoken like a true hack.’ He laughed. ‘So what can I do for you?’

I needed to get hold of the CCTV footage from the day Sam disappeared on the Tube, but I didn’t have any sources at Transport for London, or at the Transport Police. Task’s contacts at SOCA – soon to become the National Crime Agency – were a decent alternative: they’d be policing organized crime, people trafficking, e-crime and fraud at the London Olympics, which meant securing CCTV footage through them wouldn’t raise any flags and probably wouldn’t require a lot of paperwork. They’d be watching the Tube for suspicious activity anyway, and as a way to identify potential suspects, so it was natural they’d be analysing footage as prep in the months leading up to the Games. I told Task what I needed.

‘What do you want the footage for?’

‘A guy I’m trying to find – he disappeared somewhere on the Circle line.’

‘Disappeared how?’

‘Just disappeared. Got on the train and never got off again.’

‘You serious?’

‘You know me, Task: I don’t have a sense of humour.’

Another laugh. ‘That’s true.’

‘His wife came to me tonight and asked me to find out where he went. The Met opened a missing persons file on him and had one of their uniforms look into it.’

‘Sounds like they pulled out all the stops to find him.’

I smiled ruefully. ‘PC Plod doesn’t seem that bothered.’

‘You gonna call him?’

‘Yeah. I’m sure I can look forward to my usual warm welcome from the Met.’

‘I can ask around if it’s easier.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you a shout if I need a hand.’

‘Okay, well, I’ll put in a request now, but it won’t get picked up until the morning. I can probably cash in a favour and get it prioritized, so I might be able to get you something for mid-morning. You going to be home?’

‘Yeah. You coming past?’

‘I’ve got a golf tournament up in Ruislip. I can’t promise anything, but if I’ve got something, I’ll drop it in. Probably be around about 10, 10.30.’

‘Perfect. Thanks, old man.’

‘Don’t thank me yet. You owe me a round of golf.’

Fifteen minutes later, the Piccadilly line train pulled into Gloucester Road Tube station. It was 11.35 and the platform was deserted. Somewhere above me, where the Circle and District lines ran parallel to one another, Sam Wren had stepped on to a carriage and never got off again.

As the doors wheezed open, I leaned out and took in the length of the station. The morning of 16 December 2011 wouldn’t have looked like this. Sam had got on at another line, on another platform, and was headed in a different direction. He would have been surrounded by commuters too. But, at its heart, the mystery remained the same: how did a man disappear from the inside of a train? If he’d ridden the Tube to the end of the line, he would still have had to get off, because every journey terminated somewhere. And if he had got off at one of the other stations on the Circle line, rather than at Westminster, his exit would have been recorded on CCTV.

Maybe Julia honestly believed neither had happened. Maybe the PC who opened Sam’s missing persons file, who sat down and watched the footage, didn’t care enough to take more than a cursory glance and find out. But the reality, however well concealed, was that Sam must have got off at some point.

Because there weren’t any genuine magic tricks.

Only illusions.

5

Liz left early the next morning. She didn’t need a lot of sleep, which was probably one of the other reasons she was so good at what she did. Less sleep meant more prep time, and more prep time meant she was better in court. Often I’d stumble through and find her hunched over a laptop in the front room, having been up for hours. But not today.

I got dressed and headed next door – to my real home. It was chilly inside. My house faced north, so only got sun in the mornings and evenings, on either side of the property. But that was okay. The summer was good, but I preferred a cooler home.

Moving around, I started getting things together for the drive over to Julia Wren’s later. Once I’d had an office, a place that separated work and home. But it became clear pretty quickly that the two always merged, however much I tried to avoid it, so when the lease ran out on the office, I shifted everything back home: files, pictures, memories.

I sat down at the desk in the spare room, and while my Mac hummed into life, took in my surroundings. Folders. Files. Notepads. Pens. Opposite, pinned to the wall, was a corkboard I’d had in my office. It was full of photos given to me by the families: missing people, some barely even in their teens, freeze-framed in a different life.

I was good at finding them. Liz once said I had a kind of gravitational pull, an ability to drag the lost back into the light – and although she had only been joking, I did feel a connection to them. Sometimes it felt like more than that. Sometimes it felt like a responsibility; an unwritten contract. And maybe that was the reason I was drawn so quickly into their world – and why, at times, I’d been prepared to go as far as I had.

Ewan Tasker very rarely let me down, and at just gone 10.30 he pulled into the driveway in his dark-blue Porsche 911 Turbo. It sounded better than it was. He’d had it for years, but while he loved it like his daughter, hardly a month went by without something falling off it.

He got out, locked it and made his way up to the open porch. His frame filled the doorway: six-three, sixteen stone, wide and strong even if his muscle definition had started to fade. His black hair was being reclaimed, grey streaks passing above his ears, but it was one of his few concessions to age.

I made coffee and we headed through to the back garden. There was a small patio area immediately outside, with a table and a couple of chairs. Task eased into a seat with a theatrical sigh, playing on the fact that he was sixty-two and already in semi-retirement – but he wasn’t just physically imposing: he was quick-witted and sharp too.

‘You’re not convincing anyone with your OAP act,’ I said.

‘I like to lure people into a false sense of security.’ As he leaned forward to sip his coffee, I saw a USB stick in the breast pocket of his shirt. He took it out and handed it to me. ‘That’s everything I could get for you in the time I had available to me this morning. It’s a pretty fast turnaround, even for a man of my skills. Luckily for you I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a geek.’ He pointed to the USB stick. ‘One thing: you asked for footage from inside every eastbound Circle line carriage between 7.30 and 8. That’s a problem. The District, Jubilee, Northern, Waterloo and City lines all have onboard CCTV already, but the Circle and Hammersmith lines are late to the party. My guy tells me that they’re in the process of refurbishing all those trains and that a lot of them are in service now – but, going back six months, to when your man disappeared, they didn’t have cameras.’

‘So it’s just the station cams on here?’

‘Right. Sorry.’

‘No – this is great. I really appreciate it, Task.’

But the truth was, it wasn’t great: having onboard footage would have helped narrow down Sam’s route in and out easily, and given me a much closer view of his movements. Now I’d have to rely on picking him out from a platform camera positioned about twenty feet up, and tracking him through a London rush hour.

I looked down at the USB and turned it with my finger. Task had got me footage from every Circle line station for the day Sam Wren disappeared. That was 36 stations, which meant about 19 hours of CCTV for each station, and roughly 680 hours of video total. Sam got on to the Tube at approximately 7.30 on the morning of 16 December, which made things easier. But if – as expected – it wasn’t obvious when he got off, it was going to make for a hell of a morning.

Tim Weaver

VANISHED

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

VANISHED

Author’s Note

Part One

1

2

3

4

5