Vanished

to cover up what I’m doing, the more I’m losing control.

I heard Davidson enter the room behind us.

It’s strange. Sometimes I don’t feel much like a killer. Sometimes I just feel like Edwin Smart. Ed. That guy is the guy everyone likes, the one they tell stories to and share jokes with. Some days I look in the mirror and I see that guy looking back, and I forget – just for a moment – who I am. Other days, all I can feel inside me is this ache, this need, and I remember who I truly am. A man who takes other men. A man who wants to touch them and feel them. Hurt them. A man who tortures and rapes them while they’re begging me to stop. What my father would call a queer. He hated them, but it was all an act. He used to come into my bedroom at night and touch me, used to make me take his dick out when I was barely even old enough to know what it was. He hated himself, just the same as I did – but it was him who made me this way.

The letter covered all of one side and a quarter of the other.

I turned it over.

I hate who I am, but I can’t stop. I hate my father, but I still love him. I know I need to run, to get away from here, but I can’t. Tomorrow, his anniversary, is too special.

I placed the letter back down again.

Smart was a vicious, sadistic killer but one who was, at his most clear-headed, completely self-aware. In many ways, it was as sad as it was frightening.

‘A fucking screw-up, just like his dad,’ Davidson muttered from behind me. He moved in level with us. I glanced at Craw, but her eyes were fixed on the letter, as if she was determined not to give her feelings away. Davidson looked me up and down, as if I had no place being here. ‘You must be loving this,’ he said, loud enough so everybody could hear. ‘You can be a real cop for a day.’

A ripple of laughter from somewhere in the kitchen.

He snorted. ‘You’re a fucking amateur.’

I looked him up and down. Unmoved.

He leaned in to me, ready to go again, when Craw turned to him. ‘DS Davidson, why don’t you carry on with whatever you were doing?’

He stood there, the two of them facing off.

‘Are you having trouble hearing me, Eddie?’

He glanced at me, then at her. ‘No, ma’am.’

He disappeared back into the kitchen, and then she turned to me, nothing in her face – no sense as to whether Davidson had pissed her off or not – and she handed me a business card. ‘We’re going to need a full statement from you in the next couple of days but, in the meantime, that’s my direct number on there.’

I took it from her. She looked at me, silence between us, and it was obvious the tough decisions of the next few days were already weighing heavy on her.

‘I’ll see you soon, Mr Raker.’

77

All six men – Steven Wilky, Marc Erion, Joseph Symons, Jonathan Drake, Sam Wren and Duncan Pell – made it as far as hospital alive. Symons and Erion were in the worst condition and, as doctors tried to rehydrate them and repair some of the damage left on their bodies, Symons slipped into cardiac arrest, as if the only thing that had kept him alive in Edwin Smart’s basement was the lack of movement. He lasted another fifteen minutes, two of those a desperate attempt to revive him after he flatlined. But at just gone midnight, as I lay in bed across the city, unable to sleep, there was no more fight left in Joseph Symons and doctors pronounced him dead. The others clung on.

Doctors talked of the complications of the men’s injuries, of amputations and skin grafts and transplants, and the long road to recovery. Drake was relatively unharmed, on the surface at least. In the days that followed, though, he recounted how he’d been raped, how Smart had taunted him in the dark, how he woke up some nights and could feel him there, in the basement, but never see him. He revealed a little of the last conversation he’d had with Smart – the only conversation of any note – where Smart had talked of his father, also called Jonathan, and what his father had turned him into.

‘In that last conversation we had, before you found me, he started telling me about his upbringing,’ Drake told the police in his statement. ‘He said they used to call him “Ed Case” at school because he was always in trouble. He said he got caned fourteen times once, because he told a teacher to fuck off.’ Drake had paused at that point. The detective taking his statement thought it was because it was becoming too emotional for him. But it wasn’t that at all. It was that, just like I had after reading Smart’s suicide note, Drake felt a strange kind of sorrow for Smart, a sorrow he was desperately trying to fight because of everything Smart had done to him. ‘He said he grew up without a mother; that she died when he was one, so his father brought him up. He said he sometimes wondered whether life might have turned out differently if his mother had lived.’

Duncan Pell – never a victim like the others but, in a different way, manipulated by Smart as well – had been semi-conscious as they’d brought him out. When he got to hospital, Craw posted an officer outside his room. Pell and the police had a lot to talk about too, not just in terms of his involvement with Smart, but about who Smart was as a person. In order to close the case, the police would have to use Pell to fill in the blanks, and then – beyond that – they would start looking into the terrible things he’d done too.

Sam was in the best shape of all, although the term barely seemed appropriate to describe a man who’d been brutally assaulted, over and over, for the entire time he was missing. I headed down to the hospital after finishing at the Smart house, and saw Julia Wren briefly. I told her we’d catch up when the time was right. She thanked me but in her face I could see her mind was elsewhere, and I didn’t blame her for that. Her husband had returned, six months after disappearing into thin air. All she had for him were questions, one on top of the other, but – given everything I’d found out about him; all the secrets he’d kept from her and from himself – I doubted whether his answers would ever bring her the comfort she sought.

A couple of nights later, with Sam still in hospital, she called me at home and we talked for a while. ‘He keeps saying sorry to me,’ she said, but I couldn’t tell over the phone whether that made it better or worse for her.

‘Where do you think you guys will go from here?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. I guess it’s just one step at a time.’

‘I guess it is.’

‘I know he regrets what he’s done. I just …’ She paused. I thought I might know where the conversation was about to go, but I didn’t jump in. ‘It just doesn’t feel like I thought it would feel, having him back. Does that sound strange?’

‘No,’ I told her. ‘That doesn’t sound strange at all.’

The question that would probably never be answered completely was why Smart had treated Sam differently from the others, and why he felt he was worth taking such a risk over. With Smart dead, there could only be more theories and more guesswork. But as I’d sat there in his living room after finding the basement, waiting for Craw to come through, I’d looked at the photographs Smart had left behind and seen something in them. In the way his father stood. In his blue eyes and fair hair. In his thin frame and the far-away look in his eyes, troubled and isolated. It was a picture that recalled the very first photograph Julia had ever shown me of Sam, standing there in front of a window, drained and ground down, a week before he disappeared. No one could know for sure, but maybe, in Sam, Smart saw the man he loved and hated like no other. And maybe, by taking a man who looked like his father, in a place he’d once worked, dressed in the T-shirt his father had worn at the end, Smart thought he could get closer to him than at any point since he’d died.

By the time I got home after leaving Craw and the Snatcher team working their way through Smart’s house, it was almost 10.30 and, next door, Liz’s house was dark. I checked my phone for messages, knowing that there wasn’t one from her, then went through my email as well, knowing the same was true there. Once I’d showered and changed, I sat at the counter in the kitchen and thought about texting her, but couldn’t find the right words – and, in some part of me, I wasn’t sure if I’d mean them anyway.

An hour later I went to bed, and I lay awake most of the night.