The Lost

Chapter 36

The cat had gone, although a few torn scraps of food wrapper remained. There was also a small, well-chewed object that was harder to identify. Some sort of animal head, by the look of it. Probably a rat.

Nice.

Standing on the edge of the quay, Jonah squinted against the winter sunlight that flickered off the water’s surface. The barge nudged against the smaller vessels, the weed-draped tyres on its sides making protesting squeals at each rubber contact. Looking at his watch, Jonah saw he still had a half-hour to kill. Turning away from the swaying boats, he limped along the cobbled quayside. The aluminium walking stick was an improvement on the crutches, but he’d be glad to be rid of it. Although the physios wanted him to use it for a few more weeks, he’d already started trying to manage without it. Only for short stints, but he hadn’t fallen over yet.

Progress, of sorts.

His knee was still painful, and he’d been warned it wouldn’t regain its full strength or mobility. But the last operation had gone better than expected. The cosh had shattered the still-healing bone, sending fragments into the already traumatised soft tissue. There had been no option but to have a replacement kneecap fitted, and while there was still considerable damage to tendons and ligaments, time and exercise would help with those. He might not be running again any time soon — as in ever — and he’d likely always walk with a limp. But he could live with that.

He was learning to live with a lot of things.

A lot had changed in the weeks since the twins’ kidnapping. For the first time in his adult life, Jonah was no longer a police officer. He’d woken one morning with the realisation that a stage in his life was over, and he’d submitted his resignation that same day. He’d chosen to commute his pension to a lump sum payment, and together with injury compensation and the insurance he was due, he was in a better position financially than he’d been his entire life.

Now he just had to work out what to do with it.

One of the first things was to find a new place to live. Since the night their ambush had been interrupted by a full-scale police operation, he hadn’t had any more problems with the teenage thugs. But Jonah had begun to feel a prickling sense of being watched when he came and left the flats. It could have been paranoia, but he’d grown tired of looking over his shoulder. It was no way to live.

He’d discussed it with Miles before reaching a decision. They’d met at the small meeting hall in Hammersmith, during the last week before its lease ran out. Given her illness, Penny and Miles had decided to end the support group.

‘It’s sad, but it’s fulfilled its purpose,’ Miles had said, pouring tea into mugs. ‘Nothing lasts forever. We enjoy it while it does and then move on. That’s the nature of life.’

The eyes behind the glasses had been shrewd as he handed Jonah a mug. ‘You seem better these past weeks.’

‘The knee’s improving, and I don’t get as many headaches.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’ The eyes crinkled. ‘It’s surprising what can make us turn a corner, isn’t it?’

Jonah had looked down at his tea. ‘I don’t...’

Miles raised his eyebrows. ‘Don’t believe you have the right to feel better? Don’t want to let Theo down?’

Jonah nodded. Cleared his throat. ‘I suppose so.’

‘I’ve never been a believer in hair shirts. And learning to accept isn’t the same as ignoring. Or forgetting.’ The smile was warm and understanding. ‘As long as we’re on this earth, we have a duty to go on living. That’s why I’m pleased you’re moving out of the flat. It’s a sign that you’re ready for change. You should embrace it.’

‘I don’t know...’ Jonah was still undecided. ‘It’s as good a place as any.’

‘That’s not good enough.’ Miles snapped a biscuit in half. A custard cream, naturally. ‘Give me for and against.’

Against were lifts that didn’t work, a location that was no longer convenient, noisy neighbours and the chance of being attacked when he stepped outside his front door.

‘And for?’ Miles prompted.

Try as he might, Jonah couldn’t think of anything.

He’d reached the fencing outside the old warehouse. There were signs of life inside. The whole of the building was now covered with scaffolding, encasing it in a giant cage. Intact polythene had replaced the tattered sheets, the plastic billowing in slow motion as it caught the faint breeze. The sight caused a momentary tightening in Jonah’s chest, as though something had taken his breath. But it was quickly gone.

A new sign had gone up, showing an architect’s optimistic imagining of ‘a landmark new project’ of retail outlets, bars and restaurants. The development was now being called Lugger’s Quay, but changing the name wouldn’t erase what had happened there. The murder enquiry remained open, despite the events on the boat. Or perhaps because of it. Unsurprisingly, Fletcher had been incredulous when he’d heard Jonah’s story.

‘So now you’re saying it was McKinney rather than Owen Stokes. Slaughter Quay, Corinne Daly, the abduction of your ex’s twins — McKinney engineered all of it.’

‘That’s right,’ Jonah had told him.

Lying there in the hospital bed, with his knee mangled and his head freshly shaved and stitched, he’d had an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. The DI mopped at a running eye with a tissue.

‘And then, just as he was about to kill you as well, someone came onto the boat, calm as you like. Killed or disabled McKinney, and then magically disappeared along with him. Leaving you, the kids and a hundred grand in ransom money behind. But you don’t know why, and you didn’t see who it was.’

Jonah agreed once more.

‘Are you taking the piss?’

It was hard to say which offended Fletcher the most, the idea that Jonah could have made something like that up or the possibility that it might be true. As the DI had pointed out — loudly, and at length — this was the second time Gavin’s body had disappeared, with Jonah as the sole witness.

But even the DI couldn’t dispute the evidence. Although there had been no further sign of Gavin, the scene on the boat told a clear story. When Jonah had hauled himself outside onto the deck that night, he’d found they were moored at a concrete jetty outside a strip of unused industrial units. He’d described landmarks to the emergency operator as best he could, but by then they’d already located his mobile phone. Within a few minutes he’d heard the chop of a police helicopter overhead, the bright shaft of its searchlight stabbing down. Soon afterwards there was a marine unit boat moored alongside and police cars swarming the area. The twins had been taken away in an ambulance, still drowsy, but the paramedics had said their vital signs were good. Either Gavin had decided to wait till later before committing an act even he must have baulked at, or he’d had a change of heart.

Jonah hoped it was the latter.

This time there was more evidence of Gavin’s presence than the blood he’d left at the warehouse. The indentation in the panelling that Jonah had seen in the passageway was consistent with a skull being rammed into it. Skin and blood from that had yielded Gavin’s DNA, which was also found with his fingerprints all over the boat. There was clear evidence that he’d been living on board, navigating the river mainly at night and holed up in out-of-the way moorings.

His fingerprints and DNA were also found in the Transit van that had been used to abduct the twins. That was parked by the jetty, next to Jonah’s hired Volvo. Gavin had driven him to the boat in that while Jonah was unconscious, leaving Wilkes’s body to be found in his own car at Slaughter Quay.

Even so, without Gavin’s body, Fletcher might have argued that there still wasn’t enough to support Jonah’s story. But a police raid had recovered the laptop that Dylan had sold to his dealer. Its hard drive was intact, and on its search history was the dating website where Gavin had found the lookalike whose body Jonah had seen at the warehouse. The man was a thirty-eight-year-old estate agent called Neill Davison, who had gone missing after telling friends he was going on a date with someone he’d met online. The resemblance to Gavin was superficial — similar age, height and build, both with dark curly hair. But face down in the dark warehouse, covered in Gavin’s blood and wearing his clothes, watch and wedding ring, it was enough.

That didn’t stop Fletcher from quibbling. ‘Doesn’t say much for your powers of observation. I thought he was supposed to be a friend of yours?’

‘I’m not the one who confirmed his DNA,’ Jonah shot back.

Call that one a draw.

If there was one aspect of Jonah’s story the DI was most suspicious of, it was his claim not to know who had come onto the boat and saved his life. Fletcher had returned to that time and again, worrying at it to try and prise open a chink in Jonah’s story.

‘So you didn’t get a good look at him?’

‘I had a plastic bag on my head. I was busy trying not to suffocate.’

‘And he didn’t say anything? Nothing to indicate who he was or why he was there?’

‘No, but Gavin had upset some dangerous people. They must have caught up with him.’

Fletcher studied him as though searching for a lie. ‘Then why didn’t he take the ransom money? Why leave a hundred grand behind?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t realise it was there.’

‘So it was just a happy coincidence this individual showed up when he did? Saved your neck and then left, just like that?’

‘It must have been. All I can tell you is I didn’t invite him,’ Jonah said.

Technically, that was true. Jonah didn’t know the intruder’s identity, not for certain. Yet he could remember the way the boat had tipped when it was boarded, the heavy thump from the deck. There had been an impression of size and bulk as the figure had prowled around the cabin, and it would have taken frightening strength to overpower Gavin so quickly. Jonah could recall the feeling he’d had as he lay helpless on the floor, the certainty that his life hung in the balance. And he could remember the soft tapping as the blurred figure stood over him. While he’d been fighting for breath at his feet, the intruder had been calmly sending a text. Jonah could only think of one reason for that.

To ask instructions.

He couldn’t say for sure how Eliana Salim’s bodyguard had found him, or why he’d chosen that moment to intervene. But it would have been simple enough to install a location tracking app on the phone she’d given him. That had disappeared along with Gavin, but Jonah guessed it wouldn’t have been too difficult to set up the phone’s microphone to eavesdrop remotely. Salim could have heard everything Gavin said and told her bodyguard when to step in. Just as she’d told him to leave Jonah’s phone behind, so he could call for help for the twins. He didn’t know if Gavin was already dead when the bodyguard carried him from the boat, but after meeting Salim he didn’t think so. She’d want her sister’s killer taken alive.

Especially when she discovered who it was.

It still bothered him that he’d withheld any mention of Eliana Salim or her bodyguard. But each time he’d been tempted to tell Fletcher about them, he’d come up against the same objections. He’d no proof, either that Salim was alive or that any of what she’d told him was true. He didn’t even know what name she was using. And even if he was believed, Jonah couldn’t see what use the information would be.

Balanced against that was the knowledge that he owed his life and those of the twins to her intervention. Betraying her trust would be a shoddy repayment, especially if it put her in danger from whatever faceless people she’d been scared of. Jonah didn’t know how or why, but instinctively he knew that telling anyone about Salim would be a bad mistake. So would crossing her.

Just ask Gavin.

Standing outside the warehouse fence, Jonah shivered. The plastic sheets covering the scaffolding billowed and snapped, as though the building underneath were breathing. Below it a section of the façade had been sandblasted, clearing away centuries of grime to reveal pale stone underneath. A literal airbrushing of the past. But it didn’t matter how the developers rebranded this place, Jonah thought, turning away. It would always be Slaughter Quay to him.

As he retraced his steps to where the barges were moored, a now-familiar heaviness weighed on him. There were unanswered questions over more than Gavin’s fate. The third warehouse victim remained unidentified, and was likely to stay that way. Gavin had said the man had been a rough sleeper, a random victim killed for no other reason than to muddy the waters over Nadine Salim’s and Daniel Kimani’s murders. A still-young man, probably Eastern European, though even that was uncertain. No one had come forward to claim him, and Gavin’s callous dismissal had proved all too accurate. Somebody no one would miss.

It was a sad epitaph.

But it was another, unlikely victim who weighed heaviest on Jonah’s conscience. Owen Stokes’s body still hadn’t been found, and Jonah didn’t think it ever would be. Gavin had said it was weighted down at the bottom of the river, and there was no reason to doubt that he’d been telling the truth. About that, or the way Stokes had died. No matter that Gavin had orchestrated it, or that Jonah believed he’d been fighting for his own life and that of Nadine Salim, the cold fact remained.

He’d killed an innocent man.

He’d been told there wouldn’t be any charges. There was no actual evidence that Owen Stokes was dead, and even if there was, the intent and the crime had been Gavin’s, not his. Even Fletcher didn’t hold him to account over Stokes’s death. But that didn’t change what had happened, or how Jonah felt. Duped or not, he’d blood on his hands.

That was something else he’d have to learn to live with.

He was back at the tethered barges. They bobbed sluggishly on the oily water, a flock of squat ugly ducklings with the dirty swan of the larger barge riding behind. Jonah went to sit on a low wall nearby, where he could see its faded name: The Oracle.

Picking a piece of crumbling mortar from the wall, he flicked it into the water. The thought of Gavin’s betrayal was still raw. That a man he’d trusted, once called his best friend, could have known what had happened to Theo and yet said nothing, remained unfathomable.

The case was being reassessed in the light of the new information, but Jonah didn’t hold out much hope. Even if it was reopened, too much time had passed. The CCTV footage from the park that morning, which might have confirmed that the woman with the pram was Ana Donauri, had been wiped years before. Without that, or any other proof, all they had to go on was hearsay. Gavin’s word, and how ironic was that?

The Theo-shaped hole that had opened that morning at the park was still as dark and empty as ever. It sat at Jonah’s centre, a void that would never be filled. He would tell himself that at least now he was closer to the truth. But then Gavin’s words would come back to him and take the pain to a whole new level.

Of course they fucking killed him.

He’d known that there was no chance his son could still be alive, not after all this time. But hearing Gavin so casually confirm it left a wound too deep to heal. And festering in it was still the awful canker of not knowing. Not knowing if Theo had suffered before he’d died, of what had been done to him. Of how scared his tiny scrap of a boy must have been.

Yet regardless of whether or not the case was reopened, for the first time Jonah felt in his heart there was at least the possibility of answers. The people who had actually abducted Theo might be dead themselves, but there were still the ones above them. The faceless power brokers, whose decisions had sealed fates and ended lives. Including his son’s. Jonah didn’t know how he could find them, but if Eliana Salim had given him Ana Donauri’s name, then she must know others. Finding Salim again wouldn’t be easy, but it was a place to start.

If nothing else, it gave him a sense of purpose he hadn’t felt in a long time. And behind it was something else, something so fragile he was afraid to consider it. Because despite everything Gavin had told him, despite everything logic said, there was still no proof that Theo had been killed. Jonah had spent the last ten years wrongly believing his son had drowned, based on nothing more than a shoe found in a culvert. This time there wasn’t even that. Only the assertion that what had happened ‘couldn’t be undone’. Jonah knew how dangerous self-deception could be, but this didn’t feel like denial. It wasn’t even hope, just the barest sliver of possibility.

That was enough.

‘You Jonah Colley?’

He turned, rising to his feet as a stocky man with barrel legs approached. He wore a grubby plaid lumberjack jacket, unfastened despite the cold. A gold chain glinted around his neck.

‘That’s me,’ Jonah said, retrieving the walking stick.

‘You’re early.’ The man had bushy eyebrows from which longer hairs protruded, like the legs of dead spiders. He eyed Jonah’s walking stick doubtfully. ‘You going to be OK getting on board?’

‘I’ll manage.’

‘Up to you.’ He took a bunch of keys from his jacket pocket, attached to a cork float. ‘So, you a fan of tjalks?’

‘Of what?’

He gave Jonah an odd look. ‘Tjalks. That’s what this is, a Dutch sailing barge. Don’t you even know what you’re buying?’

‘I might not be buying it yet.’

After what had happened on Gavin’s cabin cruiser, Jonah knew it was perverse for him to be even considering it. But the idea had been at the back of his mind since before then, and he hadn’t been able to shake it. It was time for a fresh start, and no matter what associations this place might hold for him, from the moment Jonah had set eyes on the old barge he’d been drawn to it.

It just felt... right.

‘It needs a lot of work, I’ll warn you,’ the man told him. ‘My brother was in a nursing home for the last two years, and wasn’t in any state to look after it much before then.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘You know you won’t be able to keep it moored here?’ the man said, looking around the quayside. ‘They’re clearing out the whole place. Redeveloping the entire thing. Not before time, if you ask me.’

‘I wouldn’t want to stay here anyway,’ Jonah told him.

‘Don’t blame you. Wait there.’

Surprisingly nimble, the man climbed over the handrail of the smaller barge moored alongside the pontoon. Waddling to its stern, he swung his legs one at a time over onto the larger deck of the tjalk. Bending out of sight, he lifted a battered gangplank and slid it over the water until the other end rested on the quayside.

‘So if you’re not an enthusiast, how come you’re interested in a pile of junk like this?’ the man asked, making sure the gangplank was secure.

Jonah paused before stepping onto it. From where he stood, a car tyre used as a fender obscured part of the name painted on the boat’s bow. Only the first four letters of The Oracle were visible, just as they’d been the first time he saw it.

Theo.

‘I liked the look of it,’ he said, crossing over the water.