Vanished

56

Healy was waiting in the shadows near Westminster Bridge, the glow of a cigarette between his lips. The October before, he’d been an ex-smoker, three months on from his last cigarette, but the whole time you could see him craving them. He nodded as I approached along the riverside. Next to him on the wall were two takeaway coffees.

‘Thanks for coming,’ he said quietly, handing me one.

‘Are you all right?’

He nodded, his eyes falling on my bruises. ‘You been in the wars?’

‘Yeah, something like that.’

‘What happened?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’ I looked at my watch: 11.30. ‘What’s going on?’

Healy stepped away from the station entrance and we shifted back further into the darkness. ‘It’s Wren who left the voicemail message on Drake’s mobile,’ Healy said.

‘Definitely?’

‘Confirmed now. Forensics did their thing. Got hold of some conversations he’d had with clients at work. The boss there has all telephone calls recorded, and keeps a year’s worth on file, in case the FSA come calling.’

He handed me a printout of a forensic report. Everyone had a different voice, a ‘voiceprint’, determined by the unique anatomy of their oral and nasal cavities, vocal cords, facial muscles, lips, palate, jaw, even teeth. Forensic techs had used ‘articulators’ – the individual way muscles are manipulated in speech – as a way to match the work calls that Sam had made to the voicemail message he’d left on Drake’s phone. As I scanned the rest of the report, I saw clearly how the Met had mobilized the troops now: forensics were working Sundays, the rest of the task force had been working all weekend, everyone focused on the evidence in front of them, and the man at the centre of it all: Sam Wren. Except maybe he wasn’t doing this on his own. Maybe he had company.

‘So why are we here?’ I asked.

‘You remember what we talked about before?’

‘On the phone?’

‘Yesterday, in the coffee shop.’

I studied him. ‘We talked about a lot of things.’

‘About the things that didn’t add up about this. Why a man who’d been so careful until now decided to leave a voicemail message on his victim’s phone.’

‘It says there in black and white that it’s Sam’s voice.’

‘It’s Wren,’ Healy said. ‘I’m not disputing that.’

‘So what’s this about?’

‘After dinner tonight, I went back into the station and watched a home movie of Wren we’d been given by his missus. It’s definitely him on the phone. I don’t need forensics to tell me that. I can hear it. But …’ He glanced at me and away again. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What?’

‘He sounds different.’

‘Different how?’

He studied me. ‘I don’t know,’ he said again.

‘Different how, Healy?’

He dropped his cigarette to the floor and crushed it under the toe of his boot. ‘I don’t know,’ he said again. ‘It wasn’t that he sounded stressed. Forensics would have picked up on any stress, that’s what they look for. It didn’t sound like he was being coerced or manipulated. It was more …’ He paused. ‘It was more that there was no emotion in his voice at all. Nothing. Just empty words.’

He paused for a moment, the cigarette packet in his hands. He started turning it between his fingers and then looked at me. ‘You want to find him, right?’

I nodded.

‘I want to find him too. We want to find him for our own reasons.’ He paused, studying me. We both understood what his reasons were – he wanted to prove people wrong, people he hated – but I got the sense he was trying to work out what mine might be. ‘I know it’s his voice on the phone,’ he continued, ‘I know he was the last person to call Drake, I know Erion’s number is on his work PC … but something still bothers me. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just the things you were filling my head with, but it’s something. Thing is, I can’t tell anyone about it because it’s based on nothing. The evidence is there in plain sight – it’s there – and all I’m left with is this vague …’

‘Gut feeling.’

He looked at me. This is a murder investigation, not some carnival sideshow. Cases aren’t built on how you feel. This isn’t the fucking magic circle. He’d been hitting out at me as a defence mechanism. He didn’t want me bringing problems to the table because then he had to deal with them. Then he had to take them back to an SIO who was constantly watching him, and a group of men and women who were waiting for him to make a mistake. But the whole time he’d taken what I’d said and filed it away.

My mind turned back to Fell Wood, to the old line, to the staffroom. And then more images flashed inside my head: Pell with the prostitute, beating her and raping her, and the man – momentarily caught in the mirror’s reflection – sitting there calmly, legs exactly parallel, watching it all play out.

‘You want the truth?’ I asked.

He studied me. Didn’t reply.

‘I don’t honestly know what I think about Sam.’

It was the first time I’d admitted it out loud, the first time I’d even really admitted it to myself. I’d never seen Sam as a killer, and still struggled to see him as one now. Nothing I’d pulled out of the earth, in any part of his life, pushed me in that direction. But I’d seen men – good men – shackled to forces much darker than them; and then I’d seen the things those men were prepared to do, either because they wanted to, or because they were forced to. And in Sam’s life there was Adrian Wellis and Duncan Pell. Both of them out there, somewhere. One a trafficker. One a hunter and a rapist.

‘He might be working with someone,’ I said.

Healy frowned. ‘What?’

‘I don’t know how exactly. I don’t even know if I really believe it. I’m putting all this together as I go along, but …’ I stopped and looked at him. A part of me still didn’t trust him not to take what I had and run back to Craw with it. He was trying to reboot his career, after all. But as I stood there, I noticed the look in his face, the loneliness and frustration, and realized the biggest part of him was still out there on his own – and, ultimately, that was the part of him I had to take a chance on.

‘Your unsolved …’

A change in his face. ‘Spane?’

‘Yeah, Leon Spane. I think I know who really killed him.’

I told him about Duncan Pell, about Leon Spane, about the CCTV footage I’d studied and the DVDs I’d had to sit through. I told him about the girl and her connections to Adrian Wellis, about what I’d found out at the old line, and then about the man watching Pell and the girl in the videos. I didn’t offer any theories, because Healy could see where this was headed, and, afterwards, I started to wonder if I’d given him too much. But as he lit a second cigarette, I realized it was too late anyway. It was out there, in the space between us, and whatever he chose to do with it wasn’t going to make much of a difference to me.

I was finding Sam Wren either way.

I looked out to the river, black and swollen, a wall of rainwater cascading down from Victoria Embankment. ‘What sort of person is comfortable doing that?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘Sitting there, watching Pell rape that girl.’

Healy shrugged. ‘Someone who was just like Pell.’

I nodded.

‘Is that person Wren?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know why he’d sit there and watch a woman get beaten and raped. I don’t know why he’d choose not to intervene. I don’t know how he’d get into that situation in the first place. If – just for a minute – we’re assuming he’s the one taking these men, then this woman isn’t even his fantasy. This is Pell’s.’

‘So they’re working together.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘You’re still not certain that Wren’s involved?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said I’ve never seen him as a killer.’

‘What about if Pell’s doing the killing for him?’

‘It’s a stretch.’

‘Is it?’

He meant the CCTV footage of Pell beating Robert Stonehouse to a pulp on the floor of Gloucester Road station; harassing and bullying Spane, pushing him and kicking him; and he meant the station on the old line. Its smell. Its unseen history. Me being attacked in the tunnel.

‘Pell’s a soldier,’ Healy said. ‘He knows how to kill.’

‘I know.’

‘He could be taking the men for Wren.’

‘But Pell’s into women.’

‘So maybe he’s taking women too.’

‘But that’s my point: who are these women? The Snatcher’s left behind a trail, however slight. There’s no trail leading to any missing women. And what about the girl on the DVD? She’s alive. She’s in hospital, but she’s alive. If Pell wanted her dead, if this was part of the plan and some kind of reciprocal arrangement – if Sam’s helping Pell and Pell’s helping Sam – why let her live? Why rape her repeatedly, expose your identity on film and then hand her back to Adrian Wellis?’

Healy took a drag on the cigarette.

‘I don’t know,’ he said quietly.

‘We need to go and see the girl.’

‘But first we need to do something else.’ He took a last drag on the cigarette and then flicked it out into the night. It fizzled out instantly. ‘We need to go in here.’

‘To the station?’

He nodded.

‘Why?’

‘To talk to the patrolman who found Drake’s phone.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he got spooked.’

‘About what?’

‘Says he found it, just sitting there on the platform, at one in the morning.’

‘So?’

‘So, why did no one spot it while the station was open?’

I looked at him – and he nodded once when he saw I’d made the connection.

‘Because someone put it there after the station closed.’