Vanished

69

As I drove, I jammed my phone into the hands-free and dialled Healy’s number. It rang and rang, with no answer. Finally, after half a minute, it clicked and went to voicemail.

‘This is Healy, leave a message.’

‘Shit.’ I waited for the beep. ‘Healy, it’s me. Everything’s changed. It’s not Sam or Pell you should be looking for, it’s a guy called Edwin Smart. He’s a ticket inspector on the Circle line. He took Sam. He took all of them. You need to tell Craw right now.’

I killed the call, my mind turning over.

Craw.

I dialled the station that the Snatcher task force were working out of, then asked to be connected to Craw. ‘She’s out in the field at the moment, sir, and I’m afraid I can’t –’

‘Wherever she is, she’s at the wrong place.’

‘Well, sir, I can’t –’

‘No, listen to me: you need to connect me unless you want her to get back and find out you are the reason she couldn’t stop a killer disappearing for good.’

A pause. Then the line connected.

It rang ten times with no answer and then went silent. A click. And then it started to ring again. She was redirecting my call. On the third ring, someone picked up.

‘Davidson.’

Shit. Anyone but Davidson.

‘Davidson, it’s David Raker.’

A snort. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

‘Sam Wren isn’t the Snatcher.’

‘What? I thought we made it clear to you –’

‘Just listen to me –’

‘No, you listen to me, you weaselly piece of shit. You and that fucking sideshow Healy are done. You get it? He’s cooked, and when he’s done I’m gonna find the hole in your story and I’m gonna hang you out to dry. You think you’re some sort of vigilante, is that it? You’re nothing. Zero. And you’re gonna be even less than that when I’m done.’

‘Do what you have to do, but you need to hear this.’

‘I need to hear this?’

‘Sam Wren isn’t the guy you need to be looking for, it’s a –’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re done.’

And then he hung up.

I smashed my fists against the steering wheel and looked out into the rain. Healy’s cooked. Had they found out about him working the case off the books? A fleeting thought passed through my head – a moment where I wondered how he would react to that, and how he might endanger himself and the people around him – and then my mind switched back to Smart. I dialled Directory Enquiries and got them to put me through to Gloucester Road station. After three rings, a woman picked up.

‘How can I help you?’ she asked.

‘I’m looking for a revenue control inspector.’

‘You’d be better off calling the depot at Hammersmith.’

‘His name’s Edwin Smart.’

He could have been at any station on the line, not just Gloucester Road. But I’d found him twice there and he seemed to know the people who worked in and around it. They liked him, he liked them – or, at least, he pretended to. But he could put on a show, and he could manipulate those around him, starting with Sam Wren and Duncan Pell.

‘Do you know him at all?’ I pressed.

‘Edwin Smart?’

‘Yes.’

She paused. ‘What did you say your name was, sir?’

‘Detective Sergeant Davidson.’

I could sense a change, without any words even being spoken. Most people, even people who knew they had a duty to protect people’s privacy, started to get nervous when the police came calling. ‘Uh …’ She stopped again. ‘Uh, I’m not really, uh …’

I recognized the voice then: Sandra Purnell. The woman I’d spoken to in the staffroom, and the woman who had hugged Smart as I’d been about to approach him.

Something had been up with Smart.

‘He’s not in any trouble,’ I said. ‘I just need to speak to him.’

She cleared her throat. ‘He’s out for the rest of the day.’

‘Out on the line?’

‘No. He’s doing a half-day.’

‘He’s on holiday?’

‘Well, it’s 18 June.’

‘What’s the significance of that?’

‘He always takes 18 June off. It’s the anniversary.’

‘Of what?’

A pause. ‘Of his dad dying.’

I was heading along Uxbridge Road, waiting for Spike to call me back with an address for Smart. He was exdirectory, with no trail on the internet. No Facebook page. No Twitter feed. No LinkedIn profile. No stories about him in local newspapers. None of the usual ways people left footprints. But as the woman at Gloucester Road told me about his father, something shifted into focus and, as it formed in my head, I pulled a turn into a side road and bumped up onto the pavement in order to let it come together.

I leaned into the phone. ‘What did his dad die of?’

‘What?’

‘Do you know what his dad died of?’

‘Uh … cancer.’

I killed the call and sat back in my seat.

Whatever he was doing with the men after he took them, he was doing because of what his dad had done to him. You didn’t need to be a profiler to work that out. Killers were made, not born; the cycles of abuse rippled through from one generation to the next. But I imagined that when, in Edwin Smart’s childhood, the abuse – in whatever form it got dished out – finally stopped, it was because his father got cancer. And when his father got cancer, he was left with no hair.

Just like the Snatcher victims.

He shaved their heads to make them like his father.