The Vanishing (27 page)

Tom looked at him, eyes narrowed, as if to ask,
what the fuck has this to do with anything?

‘I imagine not,’ John said, moving his eyes back to the road. They were going through the outskirts of south London now. ‘But it was called the Wellbeck Clinic.’ He glanced over and saw Tom still looking at him, but the expression behind the eyes was changing. The thoughts were beginning to slot into place. ‘It was owned by a woman called Elizabeth Wellbeck-Eaton,’ John said quietly. ‘It was her clinic Lauren Gower was taken from.’ He saw the penny drop, but then puzzlement replaced the anger. He kept quiet for a bit, glancing from the road to Tom and back, watching him trying to make sense of it, if there was any sense to make. Finally Tom met his eyes again. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘The woman you were with – just now, tonight – she was Sara Wellbeck-Eaton, right? That was her name?’

Tom nodded, then sighed. ‘Yes.’

‘You think it’s a coincidence? My case – all the time we spent investigating the Wellbeck family and their staff – and now you’re involved with them? It could be, I suppose. It doesn’t have to mean anything.’

His son said nothing, and wasn’t looking at him now. He was thinking, chewing his lip and running through it. John started to tell him about the enquiry. He told them Liz Wellbeck had been interviewed, told them that at the time she was staying on an island called Ile des Singes Noirs. Tom interrupted him. ‘How did you know I was with Sara?’

Sara
. First-name terms. John noted it, noted the body language. ‘A colleague called me tonight, told me about the All Ports Alert. He gave me as much info as they had. Including facts related to Sara Eaton.’ He told him then about the news item about the island, and the suspicions that Sara Eaton had been kidnapped. ‘Were you there?’ he asked. ‘Were you on that island?’

‘Yes. We were there. But she wasn’t kidnapped. We got away.’

Silence. John bit his tongue. He had a file full of questions, but he said nothing. He kept his eyes on the road and they continued for minutes like that, saying nothing.

‘People were killed,’ Tom said eventually. ‘It was bad.’ He sounded dazed.

‘It was a kidnap attempt?’

Tom shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Who knows? We just concentrated on getting away. I guess it was. They looked like Somalis, some of them. Not all of them.’ Another silence, then: ‘I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to find her.’

‘She’s gone?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it. If you can just take me to my place. Then I’ll sort it. Sorry. You were the only person I could call.’

‘Your place might be risky. They might be looking for you.’

‘They?’

‘The police. Because of the alert. I’m not sure what the position is.’

‘I’ll take the risk. I have to. I need to get something, change. I’ll be there a couple of minutes only. You can drop me wherever. You don’t have to be involved. I don’t want you to be involved. I don’t want to force you into any uncomfortable decisions.’

‘I know my priorities, son. I’m an ex-detective, but even when I was working I was always your father, first and foremost. You know that.’

Tom stared away again, but said nothing to that.

‘What happened in Brussels?’ John asked. ‘Someone must have died there. That was the info.’

‘They want me for that?’

‘I think they’re just fishing. Your mug was on a CCTV shot, with the girl. The info says you kidnapped her too.’

Tom nodded. ‘Glad I didn’t rely on Belgian justice, then.’

‘Did someone get killed there?’

‘We went to find Liz Wellbeck’s PA. We found her dying, her place ransacked. Some guy appeared covered in blood, so I chased him. He fell off the roof.’ He looked over at his dad and smiled crookedly, without humour. ‘It’s true. Sounds crap but it’s true.’

John shrugged. He believed him, but he could see that Tom thought he didn’t. ‘Where’s the girl now?’

‘The girl? You mean Sara?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s not a girl. She’s a woman.’

‘OK. Where is she?’

‘Alex fucking Renton said he’d help us. Instead he did this to me and then drove off with her.’

That didn’t surprise him. ‘Drove off? What do you mean?’

‘Took her. He took her. Some fucking gangland deal.’

‘Kidnapped her, you mean?’

Tom nodded. ‘I tried to stop it, but couldn’t. Alex knows who has her. He’ll tell me who has her. I need to get to him. Quick.’

‘That’s not the way to handle it, son.’

‘I knew I shouldn’t have told you anything. You going to call it in? You’ll get her killed that way.’

‘He say that?’

‘Kill her, hurt Jamie. That was the threat.’

‘It makes no difference. Still the best thing to do would be to call it in. We should call it in quickly. How long ago …’

‘They’ll kill her if you do that.’

‘They always say that.’

‘And often they carry it out. So don’t tell me what is and what isn’t the case, Dad. I said I didn’t want to talk to you and here we are. I knew exactly what you were going to do. I should have kept my fucking mouth shut.’

‘I’m not going to do anything. Not without you saying I can.’

Tom looked sceptically at him. ‘You mean that?’

‘I mean it. But you need to think clearly about it. This is all crucial time lost. You know how it works as well as I do …’

‘I’m not calling anything in. It would be a complete waste of time. All that would happen is I’d end up in a cell for three months, then on a boat to fucking Belgium. Then I wouldn’t be able to do
anything
. I will find out where she is. I will find out who has her …’

‘By going to the thug who did that to you?’

‘He took me by surprise. It won’t happen again. I know him well. I know how to handle him.’

‘You think you do …’ John shut up. Tom was no good at fighting, not aggressive. No good at standing up to bullies, or dealing with threats. He let things build up, get on top of him. But he had a threshold, and if it all got too bottled up he could blow. Then he was pretty scary. But that didn’t make him any better a fighter. In the past when he’d lost it he’d usually come off worse.

‘I’m not a kid any more,’ Tom said. ‘I can look after myself.’

John nodded. ‘You could always look after yourself,’ he lied.

‘Let’s do it like this,’ Tom said. ‘I’ll tell you what’s happened, provided you drop me near my place and give me three hours before you call it in. Three hours.’

John nodded. ‘I won’t call it in at all if you don’t say I can.’

‘You won’t be able to help yourself, Dad.’ Tom turned and smiled weakly at him. ‘That’s what you’re like.’

‘OK. We’ll do it that way. If that’s the way you want it. Three hours. Now tell me.’

Tom started to talk at once. John realised immediately that he desperately needed to tell it, because he was in some kind of shock. Until he’d told it to someone, the whole horrific tale would lack a sense of reality, and that would make him feel like he was going mad. That was how the mind handled this level of brutality. John had seen it many times in his career. The telling of the story made it real, brought it home, gave perspective. Sometimes even the criminals needed that. Very occasionally that led to a confession. Not often.

What his son was telling him had the flavour of a confession about it. Tom felt guilty about something, though from everything he was saying there was no need for that. But that was another effect of violence. John had all the technical knowledge to understand it, but that wasn’t going to help much. What Tom had been through was something he had never experienced directly.

Tom recounted a terrifying kidnap attempt – if that’s what it was – on the island. He described the assailants, including two white guys. He told John how Sara Eaton had shot at least two of them, killed them, then how they had fled through tropical forests and escaped in a plane. It sounded like something out of a film.

From there it moved to Brussels, and finding out that Liz Wellbeck was dead. They had gone to find a family ‘PA’ to get the truth about it, only to find her dying. Tom had chased someone who had fallen and died. So they’d fled from there too. It was a catalogue of disasters and fuck-ups.

They had got across the Channel on a private yacht, then been betrayed by Alex Renton. As Tom got to the last bit the shaking stopped and his voice became harder. By the time he had finished they had crossed London and were about five minutes from his home. John had asked very few questions to clarify details. There had been no need. But he knew details were missing, pieces that would make it all fit properly. Tom was keeping stuff back.

He slowed the car in Hounslow, his heart thudding with adrenalin, stunned at what he had been told. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘I’ll stick to what we agreed, but I want you to think about what you’re going to do …’ But Tom was already opening the door. John leaned over and put a hand on his arm, stopping him. He asked the single most glaring question he had. ‘Why you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why did Sara Eaton contact
you
? What did she want?’

Tom looked away quickly. ‘I’ve no idea.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry to have dumped all this on you.’ Then he was out and walking off.

It was like saying a prayer before bed. Every single night since Lauren had been taken Rachel had done it. Sometimes she had been on odd shifts and slept during the day, sometimes in the early years she had fallen asleep at her desk, or on trolleys in Casualty, waiting for the pager to go off – but she had always found time for it. She had kept to it like a ritual every single night, over twenty-two years. She would lie down, close her eyes and imagine what she would do when she first saw Lauren again. Imagine it happening, coming true. Imagine Lauren standing in front of her, returned to her, safe, alive, well.

At first the images had been traumatic, reducing her to tears, but repetition had slowly turned them into something comforting, a mark of continued hope – a way, even, of keeping that spark alive. As the years had passed her mental picture of Lauren had changed effortlessly to try to match how old she would be. She had never – not even once – had a doubt about her imagined daughter, about how she would look, move or speak. At some stages disorienting, brutal thoughts had tried to get in there, to distort the image, and resisting them had become part of the nightly ritual, like shunning evil, turning her back to Satan. Because she was aware that the Lauren she dreamed up to walk and stand and smile in front of her was a happy Lauren, not a child who had lived through some twisted, perverted hell. She knew that if that had happened to her baby then she had no idea what she might look like now. But she had become practised, over the years, at keeping those thoughts at bay. They had no part in this night-time rite, which was something between only Lauren and her, something no one knew about, something intensely private.

In recent years the images had been the same ones each night, the same dream. She would be standing somewhere full of people – a place like an airport terminal or a railway station – her eyes searching the crowds of faces for the one she knew. The searching often went on for a very long time. Sometimes in the last couple of years she had even begun to panic, fearing that the face was gone, that it wouldn’t ever reappear. But it always had eventually. Lauren always returned.

A tall, confident young woman with long, dark, curly hair and blue eyes. She would be twenty-three now. Her birthday was 8th March. Rachel would see her hair first, moving through the sea of people, then her face, in profile – but she would know at once that it was her and would start walking towards her. The commuters would part in front of her, getting out of her way. A mood would go through the crowd – they knew, somehow, that something momentous was about to happen – and they would gradually back off, silent, watching. Then Lauren would turn towards her and start walking in her direction. As they got closer the other faces would vanish completely, and then there would be just the two of them standing across from each other, Rachel’s heart beating wildly, recognition in their eyes. Rachel would open her arms and Lauren would wrap her own around her waist. They would stand still, hugging each other, crying with relief and grief and joy. Rachel would finally feel that she had found her home again. She belonged. Because Lauren was back.

It was a myth. She knew the reality, knew that if such a thing were to ever come about it would be very different, much more confusing, filled with an intense sadness. Because the years between would be lost to them for ever, whatever had gone on. Twenty-two years of irrevocable separation. And because they would neither of them stand a chance of recognising the other. But hope feeds on myths, and without hope she would be dead. Long ago dead, wrists slashed, unable to contemplate the horror of the truth. The myth had kept her alive.

But now it was gone. She had gone to sleep tonight, for the first time ever, without doing it, without imagining the reunion. So now, in the early hours, lying alone in John’s bed while she waited for him to come back with his own child, now she felt – perhaps for the first time in her life – that she had really lost something that would never come back, something that had been taken from her so long ago – her child, her meaning, her self. The truth was only just sinking in now. Because tonight, also for the first time, she had believed that her daughter was dead.
She had thought that thought.
The invisible connection between them – the thing she had cherished like an imaginary friend down through the years, her tiny little grain of absolute madness – that link that she had been able to
actually physically sense
, as if it were a smell in her nose, or a sensation under her fingertips – that was gone. Lauren had left her.

She couldn’t work out what it meant, that she had vanished. Did it mean Lauren had died, just now, this day? Or just that she was herself only now waking up to reality? She hadn’t a clue. At first – when the link had first snapped – she had been with John and something else had opened up inside her, a channel to him, instead of a channel to Lauren.
When God closes one door, he opens another.
That’s what the nuns had taught her at school, so long ago. But her belief in God had slipped quietly away long before Lauren had been taken, and not even all that trauma and all that need had been able to bring it back, no matter how much she had desired that.