Vanished

he couldn’t handle this moment as a professional. This wasn’t about that. This was about a circle closing; about one part of his life joining up with the next. This was about spending nearly eight months away from the bodies – and about the last one being Leanne.

He swallowed, and then pushed the cubicle door open.

It squeaked on its hinges, and in the darkness – lit only by the beam of a torch – it felt like something shifted around us. Like the whole room turned a degree, awoken from its slumber. The smell was horrendous. Dense and gummy, filling the spaces around us so quickly it was like being suffocated. I moved in behind him, and against the silence could suddenly hear flies, above our heads, inside the cubicle, at our feet.

The body was in the toilet, feet in the dry bowl, legs and arms folded into itself, so – at first – it just looked like a ball of clothes. It was obvious why it had been placed like that: so no one could see it from outside. As I moved the torch over it, I could see it was a man, and his head was forward, chin against his chest, tucked in against himself in the same way as his arms and legs. Above him, a thick pipe connected the toilet to the raised black cistern. The man had been tied to the pipe to hold him in place, rope looping around his midriff and again around his neck and legs, keeping him in a ball, keeping him positioned exactly where he was. I traced the torch along his body, trying to see how he’d died.

‘There,’ Healy said, realizing what I was doing.

He was pointing to a tear in the man’s clothes, close to his ribcage. It was a deep knife wound, dried black with blood and squirming with insects. And as I moved the torch again, I saw more stab wounds, two in each leg, bigger and even deeper than the other one, there to stop him from getting up and walking away. He’d been put down, but not killed. His death had come over the next few hours. I wondered if he’d cried out for help, and if he had why no one had heard him. But then I caught sight of the edge of his face, and spotted duct tape. It was covering his mouth. He’d died in complete silence.

‘Body’s a day old at least,’ Healy said.

I took a step left, trying to get a clearer look at his face. I thought back to O’Keefe telling us there was something bad down here, and then noticed the man’s skin: there were tiny grazes all over it, like he’d been sliced with a blade.

Or with shards of glass.

‘I know him,’ I said.

It was Adrian Wellis.

60

As I’d expected, the stairs on the other side of the partition took me back up to the Circle and District lines. Healy said he would give me ten minutes before calling it in to Craw. I moved through the empty tunnels and up to the ticket hall, where Stevie O’Keefe was waiting with the station supervisor. Neither of them said much, but I got the feeling O’Keefe had been read the riot act for leaving us unattended on the line, and I also got the feeling he didn’t particularly care. As I sidestepped a series of questions from the supervisor, I looked across at O’Keefe and saw a strange kind of acquiescence in him: an acknowledgement that he’d done the wrong thing, but that he couldn’t bring himself to be down there. He offered to walk me out, and the supervisor – barely communicative by the end – just shrugged and watched us go.

As we walked, I thought about Wellis. He’d died the way he’d lived. He’d died a death he deserved. But even if I loathed everything he stood for, without pause, and knew that the world would be better off without him, it was hard not to look at a man in the aftermath of such a death and not feel troubled by it.

‘I have an old friend,’ O’Keefe said, as I tuned back in. ‘Gerry. He does the same job as me on the Circle. We meet down on the Jubilee platform sometimes. Just a little routine we have. For some company, you know? Normally Tuesdays and Thursdays.’

I nodded and smiled, but my thoughts were already moving on to where Healy and I went next.

‘I just chatted to him,’ O’Keefe went on. ‘We were supposed to meet in our usual spot on Thursday, down on the platform, but Gerry never turned up.’

O’Keefe stopped walking. I stopped too out of politeness.

‘Thing is, he said he did turn up there.’

‘Where?’

‘On the Jubilee platform – where we were tonight.’

I frowned. ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

‘Gerry got there before me on Thursday, to the Jubilee line. Normally we just have a coffee and a chinwag. He brings the flask, I bring the conversation. It can get lonely down on the tracks all by yourself.’ O’Keefe stopped and looked at me. ‘But when Gerry got down to the line, he said he kept hearing this noise, like a beeping. And when he followed it, he realized it was the phone.’

‘Wait, he found the phone before you?’

‘Must have done.’

‘So why didn’t he pick it up himself?’

‘He said it was on the actual track itself.’

‘Beyond the screens?’

‘Yeah. He said he opened up the screens and got down on to the line, but when he got down there he started feeling …’ Another pause. ‘Started feeling strange.’

‘Ill?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not ill.’

He meant Gerry was like him. He meant they’d both felt something had been off that night in the dark of the station and its tunnels. Gerry didn’t even have it in him to reach down and pick up the phone. He’d just backed up and walked away. Minutes later, O’Keefe had arrived and picked up the phone himself. But he didn’t seem to realize what else he’d said, the bigger revelation: that when Gerry had found the phone, it was on the track itself. When O’Keefe had found it, it was on a bench, on the platform, in plain sight. As if it had been placed on the track originally to make it look like an accident, to make it look like just another piece of lost property. But then, when Gerry had failed to pick it up, it had been deliberately moved again, to ensure it was found the second time.

And there was only one reason to do that: to make absolutely certain the police were pushed in Sam Wren’s direction.

I knew then that the Met wouldn’t find anything on CCTV, because the cameras went off as soon as the station shut up for the night. Whoever had left the phone on the track had definitely been inside the station after hours. Whoever it was had to have felt comfortable here, had to have known the Tube, its lines, its tunnels. And, to me, there wasn’t much doubt about who that person was.

Duncan Pell.

61

The next morning I woke to the sound of my phone buzzing on the bedside table. I pulled myself out of sleep and grabbed it. The number was withheld.

‘David Raker.’

‘Raker, it’s me.’

Healy. I could hear the soft sound of cars in the background, and the occasional voice passing. He was in a public phone box. ‘You all right?’

‘I’m eating shit for last night.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Craw. She’s so far up my arse, she’s practically in my fucking throat. I can’t go for a piss without her giving me the eye.’ He paused, a sigh crackling down the line.

I looked at my watch. Five past nine. ‘What did she say?’

‘About what?’

‘About Wellis.’

A pause. ‘I didn’t call it in.’