Vanished

81

Smart shifted the knife across the tree trunk towards him and then faced me, hood still up. The swelling had gone down, but the cuts and bruises remained bad, one of his eyes half shut and puffy, a huge cut running from the right side of his head all across his face. The gash was traced by a thick purple bruise. But I recognized him now, even with all the injuries. I could see his bent nose, recognized the stiffness in his gait even as he sat, saw the dark eyes – one of them bloodshot – and knew they were his.

‘Smart,’ I said, my voice cracked and soft.

Nothing in his face. No reaction.

I glanced at my phone, out on the trail, and remembered Craw’s call. His medical records list him as forty-one years of age, about fifteen stone, and somewhere around six-two, six-three. But that didn’t match the body they recovered from the staffroom in Fell Wood station and the autopsy was going to prove as much. Because that wasn’t Smart, it was Pell. Smart had blown Pell’s head off to prevent identification, or at least to delay it, and then he’d replaced Pell in the basement of his house and done the same: cut himself, smashed his face against a wall, let it bleed and watched the bruises form. All to give himself some time.

A chance of escape.

Except he wasn’t escaping. He was here.

‘Why aren’t you running?’ I said.

He looked down at the knife. ‘I intend to,’ he replied, his voice quiet, articulate. ‘I stayed ahead of the police for eighteen months, so I’m sure I can do it again, with or without this detour.’ He glanced at me. There was nothing mischievous in him, nothing playful. He spoke matter of factly; almost exactly the same as he had at Gloucester Road. ‘I don’t have much time, but I had to take the opportunity to show you exactly what you did.’

I glanced back at the trail.

‘No one’s coming for you,’ he said.

I looked at him. The hood was still up, his eyes dark under the ridge of his brow, glimpses of his shaved head visible when light escaped inside the coat.

Keep him talking.

‘I saw your footprints at the station,’ I said. He just stared at me. I wasn’t sure if he’d even heard me. ‘You wanted to make sure I found Pell down in the staffroom, which is why you followed me there. Once you saw I’d found him, you shut yourself in with all the others and you waited.’ He didn’t respond, just studied the knife again. ‘When did you kill Pell?’

‘I asked him around Friday evening,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s why he never turned up for work. I knocked him out and kept him tied up in the basement. Then, when I saw you out at Fell Wood on Saturday, I knew you’d followed the clues I left at Duncan’s house. I watched you in the station, snooping around. You weren’t supposed to see me, but it didn’t really matter. I had Duncan’s boots on, so you still thought it was him. But even while you were chasing your tail with Duncan, I knew I wasn’t safe.’

‘So you used him.’

‘On Sunday, I transferred him from my house to the station.’

That’s where the blood on Smart’s carpet had come from: shifting Pell down to the staffroom. He probably walked him right out of the back door and across his garden like he’d walked the others out of their flats.

‘I knew you were getting closer all the time,’ he said. ‘After you spoke to me that first time at Gloucester Road, I started following you, and I knew you were clever. I could see that.’ He paused. ‘To be honest, I foresaw yesterday approaching fast, so that was why I decided to move the plan to its final stage. When you turned up at Gloucester Road yesterday, I had to take a detour on the way to see my father.’

‘You went to Fell Wood and killed Pell.’

‘I killed him, and then I went to the cemetery for the last time. After that, I came home and started cutting myself.’ He shrugged. ‘Forensic tests would have picked up that I’d drugged Duncan. I had to make him malleable; to make it look like a suicide. But I’m sure the police would have picked up that it wasn’t a suicide too, soon enough. It was only ever meant to be a diversion. I wasn’t sure if the police were as close to finding me as you, but I decided against making a break for it either way. If I ran, the police would pull out all the stops to get to me, and I would only have had a couple of hours’ head start yesterday afternoon. If I got to the hospital as Duncan Pell and I ran, I had a minimum of a day, maybe more, they had no real idea where I was headed, and they didn’t even know I was Edwin Smart.’

‘So when you tried to misdirect police with the red dots –’

‘It was just another distraction. The more questions without logical answers, the more difficult it is for them to find their way through them.’ He glanced at me. ‘I learned that early on when I was carrying out my work as the so-called Snatcher, even if – in recent days – I’ve been less accomplished. I’m afraid you panicked me, which is why I ended up making some stupid decisions.’

‘You mean leaving the phone on the line?’

‘Leaving the phone on the line wasn’t the mistake. If it had been found there, you and the police would have assumed Jonathan Drake had either dropped it from the platform, or dropped it through the window of the carriage while the train was moving through the station. It happens all the time. But I was watching that first patrolman and when he didn’t pick it up, I got nervous and I placed it on the bench so it would definitely be found. That was stupid. I should have known it would be noted, sooner or later.’

‘So why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance?’

He shrugged again, thinking back to the same moment as me: the darkness of the staffroom and then the tunnel on the old line where he’d put a boot through my face. ‘Again, a stupid decision. I suppose a part of me still thought it might play out how I wanted it to as long as I kept you focused on Duncan and Samuel. If you were alive, you could carry on down that route, but I should have figured out that you wouldn’t. Like I said, you’re clever.’

I tried to think of where to go next.

But then he got up from the tree trunk, the knife in his hand, handle hidden in the cup of his palm, blade facing off behind him into the trees. ‘Anyway, as I said, I want to make use of the time available to me, so I need to make you understand what you did.’

‘What I did?’

He looked at me – blood in his eye, more bruises than skin, streaks of mauve reaching down like fingers towards his throat – and came over, dropping to his haunches beside me. And for the first time I understood what Sam, Drake and the others had seen. Not the ticket inspector, not Edwin Smart. The man inside Smart. Within a couple of seconds he was a completely different man, a monster, without even having to speak.

I glanced between his face and his hand, the knife gripped so tightly his knuckles had blanched, and, briefly, I thought about making a break for it. But I didn’t know how much of the drug he’d given me, how much had left my body or how much of my body was even functioning. So I turned back to him, trying to face him down, and I saw something flicker in his eyes. A second later, I realized what it was.

A warning.

He drove the knife into my stomach, coming in towards me, teeth gritted, face contorted, and every atom of my body seemed to freeze. A piercing pain, cold and hard, drove into the spaces inside me, nerve endings firing, sending agonizing waves, like an alarm, shooting into my fingers, my toes and my head. Everything blurred: my sight, my hearing, the balance between dark and light, and the next time I was aware what was going on, he’d pushed me to the floor and was standing over me, knife in his hand, my blood dripping from it. I watched him bend over me, face coming down towards mine.

‘That’s what I never understood about you,’ he said, his voice still normal; soft and coherent. ‘You of all people should have seen what you were doing.’

I felt blood running free of my stomach.

My shirt sticking to my skin.

‘Your wife died of cancer too. You buried her here, just like I buried my father in Highgate. You must understand the importance of memories, of being able to reach out to them after they’re gone. You must get that. So why did you take it away from me?’

He came in even closer to me, his breath on my face.

‘My father was a violent, abusive, drunken prick, but he was my father. My father. It wasn’t your choice to make. You forced me out into the open, you fucked with me, and you fucked with the only day that ever really mattered to me. My father is buried in this city, and I can never come back here, never come back to his grave, never be here for him because you and that prick I keep reading about in the papers – that cop, Bartholomew – have got in my way.’ He swiped the knife across my face, the air shifting around me. ‘So now I’m going to kill you.’

But I could hardly hear him now. When I tried to breathe, it felt like air was being sucked into the wound, more going into my stomach than my mouth. He shifted position above me, and this time I couldn’t even hear his feet on the floor of the forest. There wasn’t just a depression in the sound, there was no sound. Only a faint ringing, deep inside my head somewhere, like a fire alarm going off in another room.

I watched him re-establish his grip on the knife.

This is it. This is the end.

And then he looked off towards the trail.

I was fading, my vision smeared, but I managed to roll my head in the direction he was studying, and make out two vague shapes coming up the path towards us. Smart glanced down at me, then back at the trail, and as the shapes came closer, my vision cleared momentarily and I recognized the people I’d seen earlier. The couple in their sixties. The woman was still holding the flowers, and they were still holding hands.

Smart glanced at me again.

Uncertainty now.

Turned the knife. Fingers tight around the grip.

Looked at the couple for a second time.

And then he ran.

He headed off, breaking on to the trail and left, out of sight of the couple, and made for the darkness of the entranceway. The couple were too far back to notice him, except maybe to see a blur of movement. I called out to them, screamed help as loud and as long as I could manage, but they didn’t seem to react. When they got closer, I shouted it again, straining every sinew, every fibre of strength I had left. Yet when I was done, they didn’t look over, didn’t change course, didn’t even seem to have heard me.

And then they walked on by.

I realized then I hadn’t made a single sound. Nothing. Not one word. The voice I was hearing I could only hear inside my head. My capacity to speak, my capacity to hear myself, everything I’d ever taken for granted, was shutting down. My vision flickered – grey to white to grey, like an old TV signal – and then I completely blacked out for a moment. When I emerged into the light again, when objects formed in front of me – trees and branches and leaves – I was back in the forest, thirty feet from the trail, dying alone.

Get to your phone.

Get to your fucking phone.

I grabbed some grass and pulled myself forward, pain coursing down the front of my chest. There was blood everywhere, but mostly it was pain. I got about five feet and had to stop, my lungs barely filling now, my heart seeming to slow. I thought of Liz, of the last conversation we’d ever had – a fight about what I did, and who I was – and then I thought of Derryn, of the moment I’d buried her here, in among these graves and tombs and memories. And then I reached around me for something else to grab on to, clamped my hand on a tree root and pulled again. And I kept on pulling, dragging myself forward.

Minutes passed.

Minutes that felt like hours.

But I got there, and when I got there I felt death moving in, as if my body had been prepared to hold out until I got to the trail, but no more. My vision blinked in and out, my hearing pretty much gone. I grabbed the phone, half hidden in grass at the edge of the track. My muscles were failing too now, but I held on to the mobile with everything I had and pushed Call. I didn’t know who it would get through to. I didn’t know whether it would even make any difference. I was dying. But I brought it to my ear and I waited for an answer.

‘Raker?’

It was Healy. I tried to say his name.

‘Raker?’ he said again.

‘Hea … ly …’

‘Raker – are you all right?’

I swallowed. Coughed. ‘Hea … ly … I’m …’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m … dyin …’

I dropped the phone.

And, finally, there was only darkness.