Vanished

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