About the Author
Chasing the Dead
The Dead Tracks
Vanished
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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
The Corner of the Room
PART TWO
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
The Programme
PART THREE
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Legion
PART FOUR
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Family
PART FIVE
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Acknowledgements
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
Sona
PART TWO
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
The Hole
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
This is the Beginning
PART THREE
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Static
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
The One that Got Away
PART FOUR
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
The Doctor
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
PART FIVE
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Legal Right
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
Chasing the Dead first published 2010
The Dead Tracks first published 2011
Vanished first published 2012
This collection first published 2013
Copyright © Time Weaver, 2010, 2011
Cover photograph © shutterstock
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978–1–405–91731–5
PENGUIN BOOKS
Tim Weaver was born in 1977. A magazine journalist, he has written extensively about films, TV, sport, games and technology, and is the author of Chasing the Dead, the first book in the David Raker Series. He is married with a young daughter, and lives near Bath. Find out more about Tim and his writing at www.timweaverbooks.com.
For Mum and Dad
00:00:01
The camera pulls into focus.
Retired detective Ray Callson is seated in a chair in a nondescript office with pale walls and little in the way of furniture. There are blinds at the window, but they’re ajar, the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles reduced to a petrol-blue fuzz in the background. Callson takes the microphone that he’s handed. Off camera, a small, stilted voice says, ‘Just clip it to your shirt.’
Callson does as he’s asked, then straightens himself, smoothing down his grey hair, which is parted arrow-straight at the side. He is in his early sixties, but still handsome. He’s clean-shaven except for a moustache, and has bright green eyes, each one painted with a single blob of yellow – a reflection of the light attachment that’s sitting close to the camera. As he waits, he clears his throat a couple of times and checks his watch.
‘Are you ready?’
‘Sure,’ Callson responds.
A hum as the camera starts to roll.
‘Can you begin by introducing yourself?’
Callson clears his throat again and says, ‘My name’s Raymond J. Callson. I was an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department for thirty-two years.’
‘What sort of work did you do there?’
‘I spent most of that time working homicides.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘Enjoy?’ He shrugs. ‘I don’t know if that’s the right word.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m not sure you go into police work, especially homicide cases, thinking you’re going to enjoy it. I mean, you’re dealing with people who have been raped, stabbed, shot … Does that sound like it’s enjoyable to you?’
There’s no response from behind the camera.
Callson shrugs again. ‘You do what you have to do.’
‘Did you ever want to be anything else?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you ever want to do another job?’
Callson takes a long breath, as if he’s asked himself the same question many times over and is still searching for the answer. ‘Sure. There were times when you’d wonder, “What if?” My old man used to work for the county doing maintenance. There were days when I’d duck under that crime scene tape, see what one human being was capable of doing to another, and think, “What the hell am I doing this for? I’d be better off mowing the grass in MacArthur Park.” ’ He smiles but it’s humourless. ‘Actually, there were a lot of days when I thought that.’
‘But you never did.’
‘Never did what?’
‘You never ended up mowing the grass in MacArthur Park.’
‘No,’ he says, ‘I just kept turning up to those crime scenes.’
‘How many homicides do you estimate you worked?’
‘In thirty-two years?’ Callson blows out a jet of air. ‘I don’t know. Couldn’t tell you. A thousand, two thousand – literally no idea. I’d probably just have to go with “a lot”. LA was, is, a pretty violent place sometimes.’
‘Are there any cases that have stuck with you?’
Callson seems to hear the question, but doesn’t reply.
‘Mr Callson?’
Again, he’s silent.
‘Mr Callson, are there any cases that have stuck with you?’
Very slowly, he starts to nod, his eyes on an empty space beyond the camera. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Yeah, I can think of one case right off the top of my head.’
The Queen of Hearts was a three-storey pub halfway along Seymour Place, south of Marylebone Tube station. The pub was finished in the same glazed terracotta tiles used on Underground stations all over the city, and the inside was marginally cooler than outside – but not by much. The weather had been sweltering for weeks, baking the veins and arteries of the city – all its buildings, all its pavements, rinsing every window with light – until finally, here at the end of August, it felt like there was no escape from it: inside the pub an air-conditioning unit was working overtime, extra fans were stationed on a long bar, and neither made any difference at all.
A waiter showed me to a table at the back, set for two, overlooking a well-kept residential garden, where I ordered a beer, grabbed my laptop from my bag and logged into the Wi-Fi. I’d only got as far as opening the browser when my phone suddenly burst into life. I expected it to be the woman I was having lunch with, Melanie Craw. Most of the time, if she was late – which she rarely was – and she called me after the time at which we’d agreed to meet, it was to tell me something had come up and she wouldn’t be able to make it. But it wasn’t Craw. It wasn’t any of the other names I had logged in my address book. Even more bizarrely, it wasn’t actually a UK number at all.
It was a call from the US.
My contact details were all over my website, and three years ago a case had taken me to Nevada, so I’d established contacts in and around Las Vegas, even if I rarely spoke to them. But it wasn’t a 702 area code, so it wasn’t Vegas, and when I pulled my laptop towards me and put in a search for the number’s 952 prefix, I found out it was a chunk of land in Minnesota, to the south-east of Minneapolis. Who did I know in Minneapolis?
Curious, I pushed Answer.
‘David Raker.’
‘Oh, Mr Raker.’ A female voice. She sounded surprised that I’d answered. ‘My name’s Wendy Fisher. I hope I’m not disturbing you.’
Wendy Fisher. I cast my mind back through conversations I’d had over the past few weeks, trying to remember if her name had come up anywhere. I felt sure it hadn’t. I didn’t know her; I didn’t know anyone in her part of the US.
‘I’m real sorry for calling you out of the blue like this,’ she said, ‘but I was, uh . . . I was wondering if you could spare a few minutes of your time.’ As if reading my thoughts, she then added, ‘We’ve never spoken before. You don’t know me.’
‘Okay. What is it you think I can do for you, Wendy?’
‘I, uh . . . I need . . . I was hoping . . .’
Straight away, I realized that the hesitation in her voice had nothing to do with surprise at me answering her call. The staccato nature of her sentences, the way they caught in her mouth: it was distress, it was helplessness. I’d heard those same emotions before, on repeat, in every missing person’s case I’d ever taken on.
‘Has someone gone missing?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and stopped for a moment. ‘My sister, Lynda. She’s been gone since last October. I don’t know what to do . . . I don’t know what else to do.’
As soon as she mentioned her sister’s name, her voice had started to fray. I gave her a moment, my eyes returning to the laptop, to the map of Minnesota.
‘I see you’re calling from the Midwest.’
‘That’s correct,’ she said, taking a moment more to recover her poise. ‘I’m in a place called Lakeville. It’s about twenty-five miles south of Minneapolis.’
‘Minneapolis is a long way from London, Wendy.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know it is.’
‘That makes it hard to help you – if that’s what you’re calling about.’
Words caught in her throat, and then she simply said, ‘Oh.’
‘I know the States a little – I’ve lived and worked on the coasts – so maybe it would be different if you were in New York or Washington or LA. But Minneapolis – I don’t know your area at all. You’d be better off with someone local.’
‘My sister lives in England.’
I took that in. ‘Okay.’
‘Lynda has been in Europe most of her adult life.’ She was finding her rhythm now, her confidence. ‘I found your name on the Internet, and I googled you, and I read about some of the cases you’ve worked. Some of the people you’ve found. I saw a story about you on CNN, on Fox News. I saw what happened to you when you came out to Las Vegas. I saw something else about you on the BBC, about a case you worked on last year. I thought, “This is the man that can help find Lyn.” ’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Will you help me find her, Mr Raker?’
‘David.’
‘David,’ she said quietly. ‘I feel so far away from what’s happening there. I don’t know what else to do. The police, they’ve got nowhere with her case. Maybe for them it’s just a number on a file, or some paperwork in a cabinet, but for me it’s everything. No one’s heard from her since last October, and I just . . . I miss her so much.’ A pregnant pause, a sniff. ‘I’ve got savings. I can pay you. Please help me.’
I looked towards the windows of the pub, where the sun beat through the glass. This was always the worst part: hearing the desperation in their voices, the way it forged a path through to money. I’ll pay you whatever it takes. I’ll give you all I’ve got.
Just find them.
What they never knew, or maybe didn’t choose to find out, was that it was about more than that for me. I needed to pay the bills, just like everyone else, but I needed the cases for other, less obvious reasons as well. After I buried my wife six years ago, the cases became how I grieved for her. The missing became a lifeline.
Now they were my oxygen.
Yet I still felt a minor hesitation in taking Wendy Fisher’s call, felt more than that as I considered the possible repercussions of accepting work from her. She was thousands of miles away, and so much of missing persons cases was about sitting down with people, about watching the subtleties of their expressions as they reacted to questions. Skype could never relay the delicacy of emotion, grief, pain.
‘Mr Raker?’
I tuned back in. ‘Yeah, I’m here.’
‘Will you help me?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know yet, Wendy.’
She remained silent, clearly knocked off balance. ‘You said your sister’s name is Lynda.’
‘Yes,’ she said softly, still a little bruised. ‘With a y.’
‘And her surname?’
‘Korin. Lynda Korin.’
‘And she lived here in the UK?’
‘Yes. She’s been over there since 1984. Before that, she was in Spain. She moved to Europe in the mid seventies and loved it so much that she decided to stay.’
‘So how old is she now?’
‘Sixty-two – almost sixty-three. Her birthday is next month – 13 September.’
‘Okay. And she disappeared when?’
‘Tuesday 28 October.’
Today was 26 August, so she’d been gone almost ten months.
‘Where was she last seen?’ I asked.
‘Have you ever heard of Stoke Point?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘I’ve never been there, obviously, but I’ve done a lot of research. I’ve seen pictures of it. It’s some kind of beauty spot in the south-west of England. I think it’s in Somerset, on the coast there, a few miles north of . . . uh . . .’ She paused, and I heard papers being leafed through. ‘Hold on a second. Uh . . .Weston-super-Mare.’
‘Okay. I know Weston.’
‘The police found Lynda’s car there.’
‘She’d abandoned it?’
‘That’s what it looked like. Her car was locked. Her purse and her cellphone were in the glove compartment. But her keys were in scrub nearby.’
‘She’d thrown the keys clear of the car?’
‘That’s right. I don’t know why.’
I didn’t answer, unwilling to speculate in front of her – but one potential reason came to me right off the bat: Korin wasn’t the one who threw them away.
‘Did anyone see her on the day she disappeared?’
‘No,’ Wendy replied.
‘There were no witnesses?’
‘None.’
‘What about security footage?’
‘Nothing.’
‘They didn’t have cameras there?’
‘They had a camera.’
‘But it didn’t pick her up?’
A momentary pause. ‘That’s the weird part.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s only one way in and out of that place.’
‘Okay.’
‘A security camera at the entrance showed her going in through the main gate – but Lyn never came back out again. She never exited. Not on foot, not in her car, not in anybody else’s. Dead or alive, there’s never been any trace of her. It’s like the minute she passed through the gate to that place, she basically ceased to exist.’
‘All faces shall gather blackness …’
Joel 2:6
We met in a restaurant on the Thames called Boneacres. They were sitting in a booth at the back. Rain was running down the windows and both of them were staring out at a queue of people waiting in line for the Eye. The woman looked up first. Caroline Carver. She’d been crying. The whites of her eyes were stained red, and some of her make-up had run. She was slim and well dressed, in her mid forties, but didn’t wear it well: there were lines in her face – thick and dark like oil paint – that looked as if they’d been carved with a scalpel, and though she smiled as I approached, it wasn’t warm. She’d been past warm. Most of the parents I dealt with were like that. The longer their kids were missing, the colder their lives became.
She slid out from the booth and we both shook hands, then she made way for her husband. James Carver. He was huge; a bear of a man. He didn’t get up, just reached across the table and swallowed my hand in his. I knew a little about them already, mostly from Caroline’s initial phone call a couple of days before. She’d told me they lived in an old church – converted into a four-bedroom home – from which he ran his building firm, a business he’d built up over fifteen years. Judging by the property’s two-million-pound price tag, the name brands they were sporting and some of his celebrity clients, it was keeping them pretty comfortable.
He smiled at me, more genuine than his wife, and gestured to the other side of the booth. I slid in. The menu was open. The restaurant had been their suggestion, and when I looked at the prices, I was glad they were paying.
‘Thanks for coming,’ Carver said.
I nodded. ‘It seems like a nice place.’
Both of them looked around, as if they hadn’t thought about it before. Carver smiled. Caroline’s eyes snapped back to the menu.
‘We used to come in here before we were married,’ he said. ‘Back when it was a steak and seafood place.’ His wife glanced at him, and he reached over and took her hand. ‘Caroline tells me you used to be a journalist.’
‘Once upon a time.’
‘Must have been interesting.’
‘Yeah, it was fun.’
He glanced at my left hand. Two of my fingernails were sunken and cracked, a blob of white scarring prominent in the centre where the veneer would never grow back.
‘Those your battle scars?’ he asked.
I glanced at the nails. ‘No. They got added more recently.’
‘So why did you give it all up?’
I looked at him, then across to Caroline. ‘My wife was dying.’
A real conversation stopper. They shifted uncomfortably. Caroline turned her gaze back to the table, then picked up her menu. He cleared his throat. Before the silence got too long, Carver reached into his jacket and brought out a photograph. Something moved in his eyes, a sadness, and then he turned it around and placed it in front of me.
‘That’s Megan,’ he said.
When Caroline had originally called, I gave her directions to the office – but she said she wanted to meet somewhere neutral, as if coming to see me was confirmation her daughter was gone for good. After we’d arranged a time and a place, she told me a little about Megan: a good girl, part of a close family, no boyfriends, no reason to leave.
She’d been gone nearly seven months.
Two hundred thousand people go missing in the UK each year – thirty thousand in London alone – but the most powerful media story of them all is the young white female from a middle-class, two-parent family. When Megan first disappeared, there was a lot of media coverage: locally, nationally, some of it even playing out abroad. It ran for weeks, one headline after the next, every TV channel in the country reporting from outside the gates of her home. There was a name for cases like hers that unravelled in the full glare of the camera lens: MWWS.
Missing White Woman Syndrome.
In the photograph they’d handed me, Megan was sitting with her mum on a beach. The sand was white, flecked with small stones and twigs and falling away to a sapphire sea. Behind Caroline and Megan, playing, was a small boy, probably four years old. He was half turned to the camera, his eyes looking into the hole he was digging.
Carver pointed at the boy. ‘That’s our son. Leigh.’ He looked at me and could see what I was thinking: there was a thirteen-year age gap between their kids. ‘I guess you could say …’ He glanced at his wife. ‘Leigh was a very pleasant surprise.’
‘How old is the photograph?’
‘About eight months.’
‘Just before she disappeared?’
‘Yes, our last holiday together, in Florida.’
Megan was very much her father’s daughter. She had the same face, right down to identical creases next to the eyes, and was built like him too. Big, but not fat. She was an attractive seventeen-year-old girl: long blonde hair, beautifully kept, and olive skin that had browned appealingly in the sun.
‘Tell me what happened the day she went missing.’
Both of them nodded but made no move to start. They knew this was where it began; the pain of scooping up memories, of going over old ground, of talking about their daughter in the past tense. I got out a pad and a pen as a gentle nudge. Carver turned to his wife, but she gestured for him to tell the story.
‘I’m not sure there’s a lot to it,’ he said finally. His voice was unsteady at first, but he began to find more rhythm. ‘We dropped Meg off at school, and when we went to pick her up again later, she didn’t come back out.’
‘Did she seem okay when you dropped her off that morning?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nothing was up?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Megan didn’t have a boyfriend at the time, is that right?’
‘That’s right,’ Caroline said sharply.
Carver looked at his wife, then squeezed her hand. ‘Not one that she told us about. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.’
‘Did she have any boyfriends before then?’
‘A couple,’ Caroline said, ‘but nothing serious.’
‘Did you meet them?’
‘Briefly. But she used to say that when she finally brought a boy home for longer than a few minutes, we’d know it was the real thing.’ She attempted a smile. ‘Hopefully we’ll still get to see that day.’
I paused for a moment while Carver shifted up the booth and slid his arm around his wife. He looked into her eyes, and back to me.
‘She never expressed a need to travel or leave London?’ I asked.
Carver shook his head. ‘Not unless you count university.’
‘What about her friends – have you spoken to them?’
‘Not personally. The police did that in the weeks after she disappeared.’
‘No one knew anything?’
‘No.’
I picked up the pen. ‘I’ll take the names and addresses of her closest friends, anyway. It’ll be worth seeing them a second time.’
Caroline reached down to her handbag, opened it and brought out a green address book, small enough to slip into a jacket pocket. She handed it to me.
‘All the addresses you need will be in there, including her school,’ she said. ‘That’s Meg’s book. She used to call it her Book of Life. Names, numbers, notes.’
I nodded my thanks and took it from her. ‘What sort of stage would you say you’re at with the police?’
‘We’re not really at a stage. We speak to them once a fortnight.’ Carver stopped, shrugged. He glanced at his wife. ‘To start with we made a lot of headway in a short space of time. The police told us they had some good leads. I guess we got our hopes up.’
‘Did they tell you what leads they had?’
‘No. It was difficult for them at the beginning.’ He paused. ‘We put out that reward for information, so they had to field a lot of calls. Jamie Hart told us he didn’t want to give us false hope, so he said he and his team would sort through the calls and collate the paperwork and then come back to us.’
‘Jamie Hart was heading up the investigation?’
‘Right.’
The waiter arrived to take our orders as I wrote Hart’s name on my pad. I’d heard of him: once during my paper days when he’d led a task force trying to find a serial rapist; and once in a Times news story I’d pulled out of the archives on a previous case.
‘So, did Hart get back to you?’ I asked after the waiter was gone.
Carver rocked his head from side to side. The answer was no but he was trying to be diplomatic. ‘Not in the way we would have hoped.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘At the beginning, they were calling us every day, asking us questions, coming to the house and taking things away. Then, a couple of months into the investigation, it all ground to a halt. The calls stopped coming as often. Officers stopped coming to the house. Now all we hear is that there’s nothing new to report.’ His mouth flattened. A flicker of pain. ‘They would tell us if there was something worth knowing, wouldn’t they?’
‘They should do.’
He paused for a moment, his hand moving to his drink.
‘What was the date of Megan’s disappearance?’
‘Monday 3 April,’ Carver said.
It was now 19 October. One hundred and ninety-nine days and they hadn’t heard a thing. The police tended not to get interested for forty-eight hours after a disappearance, but in my experience the first couple of days were crucial in missing persons. The longer you left it, the more you were playing with percentages. Sometimes you found the person five days, or a week, or two weeks after they vanished. But most of the time, if they didn’t resurface in the first forty-eight hours it was either because they’d disappeared for good and didn’t want to come home again – or their body was waiting to be found.
‘When was the last time anyone saw her?’
‘The afternoon of the third,’ Carver said. ‘She went to her first class after lunch, but didn’t make the next one. She was supposed to meet her friend Kaitlin at their lockers because they both did Biology. But Megan never arrived.’
‘Biology was the last lesson of the day?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does the school have CCTV?’
‘Yes – but very limited coverage. Jamie told us they checked all the cameras, but none of them revealed anything.’
‘Have you told him you’ve come to me?’
Carver shook his head. ‘No.’
It was better that way. The best approach was going to be cold-calling Hart. The police, understandably, didn’t like outsiders stepping on their toes – especially on active cases – and if they picked up my scent, they’d close ranks and circle the wagons before I even got near.
‘So what’s the next stage?’ Carver asked.
‘At a time that’s convenient for you, I’d like to come and speak to you at the house; have a look around Megan’s bedroom. I don’t expect to find anything significant, but it’s something I like to do.’
They nodded. Neither of them spoke.
‘After that, I’ll start working my way through this,’ I said, placing a hand on her Book of Life. ‘The police have had a look at this presumably?’
‘Yes,’ Carver said.
‘Did they find anything?’
He shrugged. ‘They gave it back to us.’
Which meant no. A moment later, the waiter returned with our meals.
‘Do you think there’s a chance she’s alive?’ Caroline asked after he was gone.
We both looked at her, Carver turning in his seat, shifting his bulk, as if he was surprised and disappointed by the question. Maybe she’d never asked it before. Or maybe he didn’t want to know the answer.
I looked at her, then at him, then back to her.
‘There’s always a chance.’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘But do you think she’s alive?’
I looked down at my meal, a lobster broken into pieces, not wanting my eyes to betray me. But I had to look at her eventually. And when I did, she must have seen the answer, because she slowly nodded, then started to cry.
Outside, James Carver shook my hand and we watched his wife slowly wander off along Victoria Embankment, the Houses of Parliament framed behind her. Boats moved on the Thames, the water dark and grey. Autumn was finally clawing its way out of hibernation after a warm, muggy summer.
‘I don’t know what you want to do about money,’ he said.
‘Let’s talk tomorrow.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll be around, but Caroline might not be – she’s got some work at a school in South Hackney.’
‘That’s fine. I’ll catch up with her when she’s free.’
I watched Carver head after his wife. When he got to her, he reached for her hand. She responded, but coolly, her fingers hard and rigid. When he spoke, she just shrugged and continued walking. They headed down to Westminster Pier and, as they crossed the road towards the tube station, she looked back over her shoulder at me. For a second I could see the truth: that something had remained hidden in our conversation; a trace of a secret, buried out of her husband’s sight.
I just had to find out what.
The day had started to darken by five-thirty. I stopped in at the office on the way back from the restaurant. I’d left some notes in there, including some I’d made that morning on Megan Carver. By the time I got home, at just gone seven, the house was black. I hadn’t set the alarm, so when I got in the sensors beeped gently as I moved around: first in the kitchen, then in the living room, then in the main bedroom at the end of the hall. I dumped my stuff, showered, and then spent a moment on the edge of the bed, looking at some photographs of Derryn and me.
One, right at the bottom of the pile, was of the two of us at the entrance to Imperial Beach in San Diego, back when I’d been seconded to the US to cover the 2004 elections. I was pulling her into the crook of my arm, sunglasses covering my eyes, dark hair wet from the surf. In the wetsuit I looked broad, well built and lean, every inch of my six-two. Next to me, Derryn seemed smaller than she really was, as if relying on me to keep her protected from something off camera. I liked the photo. It made me remember what it felt like to be the person she needed.
I put the pictures back into my bedside cabinet and got dressed, looking around the room at the things of hers that still remained. We’d bought the house when we still had plans to start a family, but as the ink was drying on the contracts, we found out she had breast cancer. Everything seemed to go fast after that. She battled on for two years, but our time together was short.
Some days I can handle the lack of time, can simply appreciate every moment we had together and be grateful for it. But some days all I feel inside is anger for what happened to her – and for the way I was left alone. On those days I find a way to push that feeling down and suppress it. Because, in the work I do, there are people who come at you through the chinks in your armour.
And people who feed on that weakness.
The Carvers’ house was an old Saxon church in Dartmouth Park, overlooking Hampstead Heath. There were three stained-glass windows at the front, and a half-oval oak door that tapered to a point at the top. It was a beautiful building. Vines crawled up the steel-grey brickwork, the roof a mass of dark tile and yellow moss. Two potted firs stood either side of the door. The whole place was set behind imposing gateposts and an attractive gravel drive that curved around to a back garden. There was an intercom on one of the posts outside, but James Carver had already left the gate ajar, anticipating my arrival.
The gravel was a useful alarm call. Carver looked up as I moved through the gates, half bent over a bucket of water, washing down the back of a black Range Rover Sport with tinted windows and spotless steel rims. In the double garage behind him was a Ford pick-up with building supplies in the bed and a gleaming red Suzuki motorbike.
‘David,’ he said, dropping a sponge into the bucket.
We shook hands. ‘I like the car.’
I nodded at the Range Rover, soapsuds sliding down its bumper. He glanced back at it, but didn’t say anything. I figured he was trying to play down the fact that his supercharged five-litre all-terrain vehicle was worth more than some people’s houses. Or maybe he genuinely didn’t care any more. Money didn’t mean a lot when it couldn’t buy back the only thing that mattered to you.
He ushered me through the front door.
Inside it was huge. Oak floorboards and thick carpets. A living room that led into a diner that led into a kitchen. The kitchen was open plan, steel and glass, the walls painted cream. Above, the ceiling soared up into an ornate cove, and there was a balcony that ran across three sides of the interior wall, with a staircase up to it. Off the balcony, I could make out two bedrooms and a bathroom.
‘You designed this?’
He nodded. ‘Well, the balcony portion of it. The church has been here a lot longer than any of us.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Thank you. We’ve been very fortunate.’ A pause. The significance of what he’d said hit home. ‘In some ways, anyway.’
I followed him across to the kitchen.
‘You want some coffee?’
‘Black would be great.’
He removed two mugs from a cupboard. ‘I don’t know what you want to do,’ he said, filling both. ‘Megan’s room is upstairs. You’re welcome to head up there and have a look around. Or, if you prefer, I can show you.’
‘I might have a look around by myself,’ I said, taking the coffee from him. ‘But I do have some questions for you.’
‘Sure.’ He smiled, and I realized it was a defence mechanism. A way to hide the pain. ‘Whatever it takes.’
We moved through to the living room. At the back of the room, the Carvers’ son Leigh was on all fours directing a plastic car under a telephone stand. He looked up as we entered, and when his father told him to say hello, he mumbled something and returned to the car.
I removed a pen and pad. ‘So let’s talk a little more about 3 April.’
‘The day she went missing.’
‘Right. Did you always drop her off at school?’
‘Most mornings.’
‘Some mornings you didn’t?’
‘Occasionally Caroline did. If my business has a contract further afield I like to go along to the site for the first couple of weeks. After that, I tend to leave it to the foreman to take care of, and do all the paperwork from home. That’s when I took …’ He paused. ‘When I take Megan to school and drop Leigh off at nursery.’
‘So you had a site visit on 3 April?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which is why Caroline dropped her off ?
‘Correct.’
‘Did she pick Megan up as well?’
‘No, that was me.’
‘What happened?’
‘I parked up outside,’ he said. ‘Same spot, every day. But Megan never came out. It was as simple as that. She went in, and never came out.’
I took down some notes. ‘What was Megan studying?’
‘The sciences – Physics, Chemistry, Biology.’
‘Did you ever meet her teachers?’
‘A couple of times.’
‘What were they like?’
‘They seemed nice. She was a good student.’
He gave me their names and I added them to my pad. Then I changed direction, trying to keep him from becoming too emotional. ‘Did Megan have a part-time job anywhere?’
‘She worked at a video store on alternate weekends.’
‘Did she like it?’
‘Yeah. It earned her some money.’
‘Who else worked there?’
‘Names? I don’t know. You’d have to go and ask.’
‘What about places she used to go?’
‘You mean pubs and clubs?’
‘I mean anything,’ I said. ‘Anywhere she liked to go.’
‘You’d have to ask her friends about the places they used to go on a weekend. When they all got paid, they’d often go into the city. But I’m not sure where they used to go.’
‘What about places you used to take her?’
‘We often used to head up country – the Peak District, the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales. Caroline and I love the open spaces there. London suffocates you after a while. We started taking Meg up north as soon as she was old enough to walk.’
‘Do you think she could have gone to one of those places?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know whether she would have gone north when I don’t know why she left in the first place.’
I’d asked them both about boyfriends the day before, but I wanted to ask them again individually. What you learned quickly in missing persons was that every marriage had secrets – and that one half of the couple always knew more than the other, especially when kids were involved. ‘As far as you know, she didn’t have a boyfriend?’
‘As far as I know.’
‘What’s your gut feeling?’
‘My gut feeling is it’s a possibility she met someone.’ He moved a little in his seat, coming to the edge of it. ‘Do you think that’s our best hope?’
‘I think it’s worth pursuing. Kids Megan’s age tend to disappear for two reasons: either they’re unhappy at home, or they’ve run away with someone – probably someone their parents don’t approve of. It doesn’t sound like she was unhappy at home, so that’s why I’m asking about boyfriends. We may find out Megan hasn’t run off with someone.’ I paused, looked at him. ‘Or we may find out she has.’
‘But if she’d run off with someone, wouldn’t she have seen the press conferences we did? The Megan I know wouldn’t have ignored them. She wouldn’t have ignored the pain she was putting us through. She would have called us.’
I looked at him, then away – but he’d seen the answer, and it wasn’t the one he wanted. It was the one where she didn’t come home alive.
Megan’s room was beautifully presented and had barely been touched since her disappearance. A big bay window looked out over Hampstead Heath, wardrobes either side of it. A three-tiered bookcase was on the right, full of science textbooks. Opposite the window, close to the door, was a small desk with a top-of-the-range MacBook sitting on it, still open. Photographs surrounded the laptop: Megan with her friends; Megan holding Leigh when he was a baby; Megan with her mum and dad. There was also a rocking chair in one corner of the room, soft toys looking out, and a poster of a square-jawed Hollywood heart-throb on the wall above that.
I booted up the MacBook and went through it. The desktop was virtually empty, everything tidied into folders. Homework assignments. Word documents. University prospectuses as PDF files. Clicking on Safari, I moved through her bookmarks, her history, her cookies and her download history – but, unless you counted a few illegal songs, nothing stood out. There was a link to her Facebook profile in the browser – the email and password automatically logged – but the only activity in the last seven months was the creation of a group dedicated to her memory. Judging by the comments, most people were assuming she wasn’t coming home.
Both wardrobes were full of clothes and shoes, but the second one had a couple of plastic storage boxes stacked towards the back. I took them out and flipped the lid off the top one: it was full of pictures. The younger Megan got in the photographs, the less like her father she became. As a young girl, she was a little paler with strikingly white hair, and without any of the similarities that were so startling in more recent pictures. Later pictures were less worn by age, her parents older, her face starting to mirror some of the shape of her father’s.
I opened up the next box.
A digital camera was inside. I took it out, switched it on and started cycling through the photographs. There were twenty-eight in all, mostly of Leigh. A couple near the end were of Megan and what must have been her friends, and in the final one she was standing outside what looked like the entrance to a block of flats. I used the zoom and moved in closer: the entrance doors had glass panels in them that reflected back the day’s light in two creamy blocks. A sliver of a brick wall on the right-hand side. Nothing else.
I returned to her MacBook and booted up iPhoto, hoping to find a bigger version – but none of the pictures on the camera were on the computer. She hadn’t got around to downloading them. I checked the date on the camera: 6 March. Twenty-eight days before she disappeared. Zooming in again, I studied the photo a second time, but the reflection in the glass would have been the most useful identifier of where she was and it was full of light. Then, when I came back to her face, I noticed something.
Her smile.
It was a smile I hadn’t seen in any of the other pictures of her. For the first time, she didn’t look like a girl. She looked like a woman.
Because she’s posing for someone she’s attracted to.
‘Find anything?’
I turned. Carver was standing in the doorway.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, and held up the camera and the storage box. ‘Can I take these?’
‘Of course.’ He came further in. ‘I’ve been through those pictures hundreds of times. So have the police. Some days you feel like you’ve missed something. You think you’ve let something slip by. Then, when you go back, you only find what you found before. But maybe this whole thing needs a fresh pair of eyes.’
He moved further in and picked up an early photograph of Megan. I watched his eyes move across the picture, soaking up the memories. When he finally looked up, I could see he was trying to prevent his eyes filling with tears.
‘Do you know where this is?’ I asked him, handing him the camera.
He looked at the picture and studied it; shook his head.
‘No.’
‘You didn’t take it?’
‘No.’
‘Any idea who might have?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe one of her friends.’
The phone started ringing downstairs. Carver apologized and disappeared. After he was gone, I went through the rest of the box. More photos, some letters, old jewellery.
Every trace of a life Megan had left behind.
It was almost lunch by the time I left. The sun had gone in, clouds scattered across the sky. In the distance I could see rain moving up from the heart of the city.
I opened my old BMW 3 Series, threw my pad on to the passenger seat and turned back to Carver, who had walked me out.
‘I’d like to speak to your wife,’ I said. Alone.
‘Of course. It’s just, I’m out on a site visit tomorrow …’
‘That’s fine. I’d like to keep things moving if possible, so if you can tell her that I’m going to call in, that would be great.’
‘Sure. No problem.’
Afterwards, as I drove off, I watched him in the rear-view mirror disappearing back through the gates of his house. He looked like he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Give it a few weeks, and it might look like he’d had his heart ripped out too.