Vanished

39

9 April | Two Months Earlier

Craw swivelled gently in her seat, half turned away from the men in her office, her gaze on the incident room. She wore every hour of the investigation on her face: dark rings under her eyes that she’d tried to disguise with make-up; the pale, almost translucent skin that shadowed insomnia; the far-away look of someone who’d imagined many times over what it would be like to walk away. Forty days after the third victim, Joseph Symons, went missing, they still had nothing.

Next to Healy was Davidson. On the other side of Davidson was Sallows. On the left-hand side of the office were other, senior CID cops: Sampson, Frey, Richter and then Carmichael, who had a notepad in his hand and was tapping a pen against his thigh. He hadn’t written anything down yet.

Finally, Craw looked back at the group. ‘I’ve got to do a press conference in two hours. I’ve got to go out there, in front of half the journalists in the country, and I’ve got to tell them what we’ve found and how we’re going to catch this bastard.’ She reached down in front of her and picked up a piece of paper off the desk. It was blank. ‘This is what we’ve found. What’s written on Carmichael’s pad is what we’ve found. Six weeks after Symons gets whisked off into the night, and we’re in the same place as we were when Wilky got taken. And he’s been missing eight fucking months.’ She smashed the flat of her hand on the desk – papers gliding off, pens rattling, her keyboard leaping from its position – and turned and looked out at the incident room again.

Silence. Then the gentle squeak of her chair as it moved back and forth.

‘So one of you give me something.’

Healy waited for Davidson or Sallows to leap in; to try and build something from nothing, just so they could score points, but even they realized it was pointless. The case had already crossed that line. What it needed now was something to jump-start it.

‘Ma’am,’ Healy said, and everyone in the office turned to him.

He glanced briefly at Davidson and Sallows, their eyes narrowing, a faint look of disgust on Davidson’s face. Sallows made an obvious show of smacking his lips together like anything Healy said left a bad taste in his mouth.

‘What is it, Healy?’ Craw asked.

Healy turned his attention to her. ‘In October 2010 a man was found stabbed to death on Hampstead Heath. He –’

‘We’ve already been down that road, Colm,’ Davidson said, a hint of amusement – unseen by Craw – on his lips. When he turned to Craw, he’d wiped his face clean: no amusement, no expression of any kind. ‘You’ll remember, ma’am, that DS Sallows came to see you about this case a couple of days after our first victim, Steven Wilky, went missing back in August last year. HOLMES put it forward as a possible connection, given the circumstances of Wilky’s disappearance.’

Craw nodded, but her eyes didn’t leave Healy. ‘I remember,’ she said. In her face Healy could see an invitation to continue, not just because she was desperate for a lead, but because she wanted to see whether her instincts about him had been correct.

‘I know Sallows looked at this before,’ he said, and shifted forward in his seat. He hadn’t made any notes on this; this was all from memory. A couple of days earlier, he’d come into work and found the drawers of his desk had been pulled out and tipped all over the floor. Later the same day, in a Snatcher briefing, when Craw had asked him something, he’d opened his notepad to find pages had been ripped out. He’d stumbled his way through her question, to the amusement of Davidson, Sallows and some of the other cops, but he’d looked disorganized and amateurish. Craw had shown nothing, but it must have put doubts in her head. Now he was going to redress the balance.

‘So what have you got that’s new?’ she asked.

‘Nothing, ma’am.’

‘Then we’re done here.’

‘There are too many connections between the Snatcher victims and this case for us to bin it entirely,’ Healy continued. ‘Not without looking at it properly.’

‘We looked at it properly the first time, Healy,’ Davidson said.

‘We need to look at it again.’

Sallows smirked. ‘Are you saying I can’t do my job?’

‘No.’

‘You think I wasn’t thorough enough the first time round?’

‘No.’

‘Then what?’

But Healy wasn’t looking at Sallows, he was looking at Craw. She held his gaze for a moment and then scanned the room. ‘Who’s up to speed on the Hampstead Heath murder?’ Sampson, Frey and Carmichael all shook their heads. They would have seen that it had been marked up as an early potential lead when they joined the investigation after the second victim – Marc Evans – was taken, but they wouldn’t have gone into detail on it if it had already been relegated to a sideshow on Sallows’s say-so.

‘Okay,’ Craw said, looking at Healy, ‘you’ve got two minutes.’

He nodded. Davidson glanced at Sallows and shook his head. Healy ignored them and looked at the other cops. ‘The victim’s name was Leon Spane.’

‘Spane?’ Sampson asked.

‘Yeah. S-P-A-N-E. Spane was a 28-year-old from Tufnell Park. His naked body was found on the edge of Hampstead Heath, near Spaniards Road, on 19 October 2010. He’d been stabbed in the throat. The blade went so deep it perforated the skin on the back of his neck. His penis had also been removed – post-mortem, with the same knife – and left in the grass next to him. Lividity suggested he’d been brought from wherever he’d been killed.’ Healy paused, letting them take it all in. All eyes were on him now, even those of Davidson and Sallows. ‘And whoever killed Spane had shaved him.’

‘Shaved him how?’ Carmichael said, from the back of the room.

‘Shaved his head,’ Healy replied. ‘Right before the body was dumped.’

A tremor passed across the room, and a couple of the cops – Frey, who was the newest member of the team, and Sampson – both looked at Craw. Her eyes were still on Healy. ‘You understand why we dismissed it though, Healy – right?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘This is about as far from our guy’s MO as you can get.’

Healy nodded. ‘I agree, ma’am.’

‘Our man takes them, and he keeps them. Or he leaves their bodies concealed. Or he dumps them somewhere remote. He doesn’t leave them on Hampstead Heath, in plain sight, in the middle of a city with 7 million people in it.’

Healy nodded again.

‘The first victim, Wilky, has been missing since 11 August 2011,’ Craw went on, ‘and we still haven’t found his body. The second, Evans, since 13 November. The newest, Symons, since 28 February. They don’t come back.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘He isn’t aggressive either,’ Sallows said, stepping in, sensing an opportunity to kill Healy off. ‘At least not at the scene. There are no signs of a struggle at any of the victims’ flats or houses, and no sign of a break-in. They all lived on their own, in their own places. Spane didn’t. Plus there’s the doubts over the hair: Healy says someone shaved Spane’s hair for him, but forensics say the hair was shaved before he died, so it’s just as likely – in fact, probably more likely – that Spane shaved it himself.’ Sallows paused, glancing at Craw, but she made no effort to stop him. ‘And what you can safely say about our guy, beyond all reasonable doubt, is that he isn’t the type of killer who’s going to dump a body and then spend the next minute messily chopping the victim’s dick off. In fact, with no bodies to find, our guy might not be a killer at all.’

‘What does he do with the men if he doesn’t kill them?’ Healy asked.

Sallows glanced at Craw but didn’t say anything. Craw leaned forward at her desk and laid both hands flat to the surface. ‘Is that it, Colm?’

‘Don’t you think it would be worth looking into?’

‘Sallows looked into it.’

He glanced at Sallows and then to Davidson; there was a hint of a smile on Davidson’s face again, as if he sensed the whole room were now seeing Healy for who he was: a fraud of a cop. ‘I’ll take this case,’ Healy said to her, ‘and I’ll run with it. It won’t impact upon my time, but I will report back as soon as I find anything. It’ll be off the books.’

‘Just like normal,’ Davidson said quietly, but loud enough to be heard.

‘Fuck you, Eddie.’

‘All right, calm down,’ Craw snapped, shooting them both a look. Davidson slid down into his chair, arms crossed on his belly, a satisfied smile on his face. Over his shoulder, like a parrot, Sallows was an exact replica. Craw turned to Healy. Everyone in the office was staring at him. Davidson winked, out of sight of Craw. Sallows had a look on his face that was so clear it was like Healy could see right into his head. You’re done, he was saying. You had your chance – and you crumbled. But Healy wasn’t about to crumble. Not now. Not in front of them.

‘You missed something,’ he said, staring at Sallows.

The smile fell from his face like a stone dropping down a well. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he said, incensed – but Healy could see the doubt in him now.

The minute you brought up my daughter, the minute you tried to use her as a way to get at me, you changed the game. Now I’m going to put you in the fucking ground.

Craw shifted forward. ‘Healy?’

He turned to Craw. ‘Sallows is responsible for checking the CCTV footage from each of the buildings the victims were taken from, is that right?’

‘Yeah,’ Sallows interjected. ‘I checked them all and there’s nothing to find.’

‘Not true.’

‘Get to the point, Healy,’ Craw said.

‘There are consistencies at all of the scenes – the type of victim, their build, their sexuality, the type of location they live in, the hair on the pillow. There’s something else too. At each of the crime scenes there’s been no working internal lighting.’

Craw’s expression changed. ‘Explain.’

He glanced at Davidson and Sallows: Davidson was watching him, eyes narrow, head tilted, trying to see where this was going; Sallows looked as white as a ghost.

‘Every interior light leading up to the flat, including the hallway the flat is on, has been out. In the latest one, in Symons’s building – at the front entrance, at the foyer – the whole floor was out. There were no working bulbs at all.’

‘These places are shitholes,’ Sallows said.

‘It’s not just that,’ Healy replied. ‘I went back and checked the CCTV footage from each of the scenes. It’s difficult to make anything out on the night the victims were taken. You can see vague figures passing in and out of the building, but not much apart from that.’

‘So?’ Sallows said.

‘So I went back and requested the footage from the two weeks prior to each of the victims being taken – of the front of the building and the foyer; as much of the interior as I could get hold of – and I watched it back.’ He turned to Craw. ‘The lights were working at all of the crime scenes three days before the victims were taken.’

Silence. No sound at all, from anyone.

But a few of them knew where this was going. Craw dropped back into her chair, thin fingers massaging her brow; Davidson shifted, looking anywhere but Healy.

Sallows just stared into space.

‘Two nights before, a man walks up to each of the buildings and he systematically dismantles or breaks every single light at the entrances and inside the foyers of the tower blocks. We don’t have CCTV for the individual hallways, but we can assume he kills the lights there too. It’s the same man, wearing the same clothes, every time: black trousers, hooded top, no way to identify him. But we have him on film, we’ve always had him on film – and we know what he’s wearing, his physicality, his build and how he’s able to walk them out the front door without being seen.’ Healy kept his eyes on Craw, but in his peripheral vision he could see the rest of the room. Already Davidson had come forward on his seat, away from Sallows’s space, like a snake moving for shade, leaving his friend, his fellow tormentor, isolated and alone at the back of the room. ‘The problem was,’ Healy continued, fixing his gaze on Sallows, ‘we were too lazy to check any further back than the night they were taken.’

Silence.

Craw finally looked up at Healy, then across to Sallows, then out to the rest of the room. ‘Okay, back to work,’ she said. ‘Kevin, stay where you are.’

They all filed out, Healy following Davidson.

Once they were out of sight of Craw, her office door slamming shut, he stopped and watched Davidson head off between the desks to his seat at the far end. A couple of minutes later, Healy looked up to see Davidson watching him.

He stared back.

One down, one to go.