Vanished

Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

‘If I call in Wellis, it turns into a shitstorm on a hundred different fronts,’ he went on. ‘I have to explain what I was doing down there, I’d have to pretend I don’t know who Wellis is, would have to dream up some story for Craw about no one else being with me, despite O’Keefe and that station supervisor seeing you come in and go out.’

‘And if it gets out that Wellis is dead –’

‘Eric Gaishe isn’t gonna be scared about talking any more.’

The only reason Gaishe remained silent was because he was terrified of Wellis’s reach. With Wellis out the way, and if he had any sense, Gaishe would start angling for a deal, because he knew the clients just as much as Wellis. And that would eventually lead the Met to Duncan Pell.

‘Then we’re no longer ahead of the curve,’ I said quietly. ‘So if Craw doesn’t know, why’s she on to you?’

‘She knows something’s going on,’ he replied, and I remembered how she’d been when she’d come to the house. She was smart – even Healy’s lies were struggling to protect him.

‘You need to give her something.’

‘If I give her something, she’ll know I’ve been withholding.’

‘I know. But it’ll take out some of the heat.’

I could hear a sharp intake of breath, as if his teeth were gritted. ‘Fucking Davidson. He’s the reason she’s like this. He’s just there, putting ideas in her head.’

‘About what?’

‘About you and me.’

‘There’s nothing you can do about that. We did what we did last year, and there’s no going back. But we did it for the right reasons, remember that.’ I paused, letting that settle with him. His daughter, the man who had taken her, those were the right reasons. ‘You could take a bullet for Davidson right now and it wouldn’t make any difference.’

Silence.

‘There’s something going on with him,’ he said finally.

‘With Davidson?’

‘Yeah. He doesn’t say anything to me now.’

‘As opposed to?’

‘As opposed to baiting me every bloody day. If they’d left me alone, I wouldn’t have tried to shut them down. But since Sallows got the boot, Davidson’s hardly said anything to me. Not directly. It’s like I don’t exist any more.’

‘You exist. He must have some other plan.’

‘Like what?’

I was about to say I didn’t know, but then I recalled something in Healy’s face the day before, a hint of sadness, of suppression. I thought at the time that it might be a secret he was keeping, unrelated to the case.

‘You got any chinks in your armour?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean by that?’

He’s not going to play ball. ‘I mean, have they got anything they can come at you through? Davidson’s not going to outsmart you on police work, but he’s not stupid. I’ve met Craw. She’s clever. Watchful. She’s not going to have her head turned by a guy like him. She doesn’t care about the crap he’s spinning for her. Maybe she’s watching you more closely, maybe she isn’t, but if she is it’s not because of him, it’s because you’ve set off alarm bells in her head about something. Spun a lie she doesn’t believe.’

‘She thinks you and me are working together.’

‘Do you think that’s all it is?’

Another small pause.

‘Healy?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually, and as I looked down at the phone I felt a bubble of anxiety. Not for me. I could handle it if the police turned up on my doorstep, if they found out I’d completely disregarded their wishes and continued to search for Sam Wren. It was Healy I felt uneasy for. He was lying to me, the only person he could trust, and if he was lying to me, it meant he had something he was willing to protect. And in my experience of him, that meant he was planning on doing something stupid.

‘Be careful, Healy.’

‘About what?’

‘About whatever you’re protecting.’

He didn’t respond. The line drifted a little, and I could hear more cars. A horn. He was calling me on a public phone so there was no trace of contact between us. It had been the same every time: every call to me had been from a random central London number. It was so typically Healy: on the one hand, he had the clarity of purpose not to leave a trace of himself; on the other, it was likely he was harbouring some rash and foolish plan.

‘You still want to find your man?’ he said after a while.

‘Of course I do.’

‘Then meet me at King’s College Hospital at twelve.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s where the girl on the DVDs is.’

62

King’s College Hospital was sandwiched between Coldharbour Lane and Denmark Hill, about two and a half miles south of the river, and it was a building I didn’t have a single good memory of. In my days as a journalist, one of my sources had bled out in A&E after being stabbed in the chest. Then, four years later, Derryn and I had sat together in the oncology department, waiting for a second opinion we hoped would change the course of our lives. It didn’t. The second opinion was the same as the first, except delivered with none of the tact, and when we left, we left the hospital system for good and she died six months later. I hoped my third time would be better, hoped it would bring some small glimmer of light – but given what I’d seen on the DVDs of Pell, and how the girl had looked when I’d found her in Adrian Wellis’s loft space, I wasn’t holding out much hope.

Healy was waiting in the car park at the rear of the campus. As I swung the BMW into a space, I killed the engine and watched him in the rear-view mirror for a moment. He was scanning his surroundings, eyes everywhere, trying to see if anyone had followed him here. He probably had good reason to be suspicious, but there was a look on his face, a mixture of anguish and paranoia, which he’d have to lose if we were going to get anywhere with the girl.

We walked across the car park, light rain drifting from right to left, and headed inside. The corridors were cool and smelt faintly of boiled food and industrial-strength cleaner, even though every window and door was open for as far as the eye could see. The intensive-care unit was on the other side of the campus, so we followed the signposts through the bowels of the hospital, neither of us talking, just moving silently from one end to the other. About twenty feet short of the ICU front desk, Healy took me aside and brought me up to date.

‘She opened her eyes for the first time yesterday,’ he said, ‘but she’s still pretty screwed up. Cheekbones and nose were smashed in, and one of her ears has been torn. Plus she has all the cuts and bruises you’d expect a woman to have after being kept in a loft and raped repeatedly by a couple of fucking animals.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Marika.’

I nodded, and let Healy lead the way.

Marika Leseretscu was at the end of a long ward, the smell of food and cleaning products giving way to the oppressive tang of sickness. Outside her door stood a young, uniformed officer, an empty seat next to him with his hat perched on it and his jacket over the back.

‘Morning,’ Healy said to the officer.

‘Morning.’

He got out his warrant card. ‘I’m DC Healy.’

The officer nodded, and his eyes fell on me.

‘This is …’ Healy paused, just for a second, and I realized he’d tried to think of a cop who might have accompanied him here, who might have wanted to partner with him, and he couldn’t think of anybody. Not one