The Vanishing (28 page)

Tonight, she had fallen asleep in John’s arms and had felt only relief, an immense weight lifted from her. She had, in a way, chosen not to go there, not to think those thoughts, not to imagine her child again. She had chosen to let her go. But only because there had been no option. Because the link was already gone. She had felt that with absolute clarity. The link was gone. She had even said it to John, told him what it meant – that she no longer believed her daughter was still alive. She had somehow actually said that to another person, then gone on to do other things with him, intimate things. As if it were all finally behind her, the act no longer necessary – she had become what she had so long only pretended to be – a normal, healthy woman.

But it wasn’t true. She knew now, at four in the morning, lying alone and cold, she knew now that she would never be normal, that everything was still somehow an act. What had happened between John and her had meant something profound. She had no doubt about that. It had been beautiful. Something she had never imagined would come to her again. But now it seemed only bitter, a species of disgusting animal treachery.
As if she had traded Lauren for John.
She rolled on to her side under the covers and pulled her knees up to her chest. She could feel the blackness rising up around her. She groaned and prayed that John would hurry, that he would return soon.

Tom leaned on the wall at the corner of the street and scrutinised the parked cars and silent spaces. The street was dead. No lights in the houses, curtains all closed. No sign of anything he should watch out for. His own car was still on his drive, where he had left it three and a half days ago. He had come full circle. As if nothing had happened.

He crossed the street and took the service alley that ran alongside number 42, then down the back of all the gardens. Some people used it for their rubbish and he heard cats, maybe even foxes, scrambling away from the wheelie bins as he made his way cautiously past the overgrown hedges and broken fence slats, watching far ahead for any sign that someone might be waiting at his house. But as he got closer he was sure he was alone. There was no one watching for him.

He walked up through his short garden until the automatic tungsten light dazzled him, then lifted the mat outside the little shed at the top of the garden, retrieved the back-door key and unlocked the door. Inside the alarm system bleeped its warning and he switched it off, then leaned on the kitchen counter for a few moments, catching his breath. His head was spinning, he felt nauseous. But it settled after a few deep breaths and he checked the house without being sick or collapsing. Everything was as it had been three days ago. No one had been in.

He pulled the soiled clothing off and went up the stairs naked. He couldn’t travel around with blood all over him. That would attract unwanted attention. He needed to stay free and unimpeded. He was the only person who could get to Sara quickly enough. He was certain of that.

He turned the shower on and stood under it without waiting for it to warm up, sucking his breath in. As it warmed he washed the blood off him, stood with the water running through his hair until the dirty brown stream turned clear. Then he dried himself quickly and put fresh clothes on. He took a maximum dose of some painkillers he’d been given for a twisted ankle some years ago, something stronger than ibuprofen. He didn’t actually have any pain at all right now, not even from his ribs, which had hurt with every breath all the way through the car journey with his father. The adrenalin had taken over, he thought. Or maybe this was just what happened – you got used to it. Tomorrow might be a different story. Either way, he didn’t have time to think about what was hurting and what wasn’t.

In the kitchen he wolfed bread, ham and cheese, without bothering to make a sandwich with it all. Then a bar of chocolate. He drank a full bottle of some sports drink, promising energy via caffeine and sugar. He was still starving. But there wasn’t time to eat more. He opened the connecting door to the garage and found the baseball bat he kept there, along with other sporting kit he kept meaning to use with Jamie. From a locked cabinet he took out a spare mobile, checked it was still charged and fired it up. It had never been used, but it had a duplicate of his SIM card. It was his father who had taught him to keep spare, untraceable mobiles. He should have had one like this when he had made the call to Alex fucking Renton, three years ago.

He locked the doors and went out to his car, put the bat in the back and started the engine. As the car slipped down his drive he checked the time on the dash. Coming up to five in the morning. He reckoned he had used up about thirty-five minutes of his three hours. It would only take another ten minutes to get to Alex’s house, so if Alex was in and his dad stuck to the deal he would be OK. Plenty of time to do what he had to.

There was no question of John just driving off and waiting three hours. Did Tom really think he would do that? Maybe he hadn’t even considered it. John could see that his head was filled with extreme images, all his concentration taken up with what he thought he had to do – which was rescue the girl, even if that meant confronting the thug who had just kicked seven bells out of him. There was a spark of something heroic in that, John realised, something which made him smile despite his fears. Tom had once got a judge’s commendation for arresting a masked, armed robber, John remembered. The gun hadn’t been loaded, but Tom hadn’t known that. And there’d been some citizen’s bravery thing for pulling a child out of the Thames. All this before the mistake that got him kicked out. The tosser who had just beat him was the author of that mistake. That might make for a lot of getting even in Tom’s confused head. So there was no chance at all that John was just going to leave him to it.

So he had watched Tom until he had passed the end of the street, then got out of the car and followed him to the corner. He leaned on the wall Tom had only just rested against and peered down towards his house. After about five minutes lights had started to go on, downstairs, then upstairs. He had walked farther down the street, until he was in earshot. He couldn’t hear blows or screams, or any other sign of immediate trouble, so he had walked quickly back to the car, started it up and moved it so that it was almost at the corner and he could see Tom’s driveway without getting out. He had watched and waited.

His own head was swimming with conflicting demands. The information Tom had given him was organising itself slowly. He sifted it methodically, while he watched in silence. He put together a chronological sequence of all the events – everything his son had told him he’d been through – then a separate list of things he would follow up – if he were running an inquiry. Which he was, in a way, because Grenser had never gone away. He was still doing it, still thinking like an SIO. It was automatic.

Did all this his son was going through have something to do with Lauren Gower’s kidnap twenty-two years ago? That was the huge question. His instincts told him there was no coincidence. He slotted together various key pieces of information to back that up – including his son’s link to Sara Eaton. He tried to pull back from his memory everything they knew about Sara Eaton, and couldn’t believe that it was hardly anything at all. She was a footnote to the inquiry, born after the event. The child of a woman who was herself a marginal witness. How old had Tom said she was? Twenty? Twenty-one on Friday. He rubbed his temples furiously. It was an easy thing to forge birth certificates. She could be twenty-three on Friday, without even knowing it.

He couldn’t believe he was considering that. It made him exhale deeply. Was
that
what he was considering?

What he should have been doing was ignoring the little pact with Tom and calling it in. It was a kidnapping. The girl – whoever she was – would be in danger. This Renton had information that might be worked out of him, information that might be time-crucial. Except Tom was right on that – Renton wasn’t going to give anything away without violence, and this wasn’t the seventies. But to get in among the perpetrators, quickly – that might disrupt things, throw a spanner in the works. It might kill her too – his son was correct on that.

But that wasn’t a concern that could stop them doing something. They had to do
something
. ‘They’. Who was he kidding? He wasn’t even a part of
them
any longer. And the last thing he wanted was to put Sara Eaton in danger.

The reality was that no one was going to discover anything fast. They would have to wait for the ransom demands, take it from there. But he should at least – in that case – be warning them to get in contact with her father. Right now. No delay. Delay was what turned abduction cases into murders. But this was more professional. They would be after money, not sex. They weren’t going to kill her – whoever they were – unless there was a threat to them. Tom was right again.

And what if his crazy suppositions were right?
What if?
Then Freddie Eaton wasn’t her father and all bets were off as to what exactly was going on here. Could he really risk contacting Freddie Eaton, given that possibility?

His thoughts were interrupted as Tom came out on to his drive, hands full. John saw a stick of some sort, a baseball bat or a metal bar, he couldn’t see clearly. Tom was making no attempt to hide it. He put it in the back of his car, got in, and seconds later the car was sliding back into the road. John swallowed hard. What the fuck was Tom thinking about? He lay himself flat across the passenger seat. He wondered whether Tom knew what he drove, whether he had even noticed. He waited until he heard the car turning in front of him, then switched the engine on and sat up. He could see the tail lights ahead. He waited until they went round the bend, then pulled out after them.

The man was right in front of Sara, kneeling there, inches away, a plate of something held out towards her. He spoke to her quietly, said something in Russian. She didn’t get it, but she recognised him. She could barely keep her eyes open, but she knew who he was, knew the scarred face, his voice. The same man who had come into the car and drugged her. The man she had shot at on the island, the man who had killed all her friends. She tried to pull away from him, to shrink back, but something was holding her in place, dragging painfully at her leg. And her head kept sinking back, her eyes rolling up. What had they given her? ‘
Don’t drug me again
,’ she pleaded, with a feeble, pathetic voice. ‘
No more of that … I won’t run …
’ She felt so sick. She just wanted to be able to sit up without her head spinning, open her eyes properly, wake up, work out what was happening to her. She could smell the food on the plate, but it made her stomach turn. Something was very sore at her side, or under her arm.
What had they done to her?
She could hear herself retching, but there was nothing coming up. How long was it since she had last eaten? She collapsed back into something soft and lay there panting, felt the queasy, terrifying fog creeping up again …

The next thing she knew she was sitting up and drinking, her head groggy. The same man was there, holding a cup of water to her lips, speaking softly to her, again in Russian, so she still understood very little. Normally she could do it, but not now, not like this. She tried to say that – that she didn’t speak Russian, only French or English. She didn’t want him to know that she spoke some Russian. But then suddenly the water took effect and her head was very clear. Her eyes moved around and took in the scene – the essential elements of it. She saw the enclosed space, the mattress she was sitting on, her torn clothes, the dim light bulbs, the dirty metal walls, the thick shackle digging into her ankle and pinning her to the floor, that man’s face right there beside her. She remembered at once what was happening and jolted back, away from him, so the water spilled all over. She opened her mouth to scream but he lunged towards her, knocking her backwards and pressing a rough, massive hand over her face. His body pinned her as he hissed in her ear, in English this time, telling her not to scream, to shut up. Her chest began to heave – she couldn’t breathe with his hand blocking her mouth, his weight on top of her – she tried to nod to him. He took his hand away and she gasped for air. ‘Don’t scream – it will hurt my ears,’ he said, then sighed and stood up, moving back from her. ‘And it’s useless,’ he added. ‘No one can hear you here. Besides, I’m not here to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you. You understand? You’re not going to be hurt if you cooperate.’

She waited for her breathing to settle. But her head was spinning. She was too dizzy to sit up. She crawled as far back from him as she could and curled into a ball, keeping her eyes open and on him. ‘What did you do to me?’ she hissed. ‘What have you done?’ She started to retch again. The room smelled of vomit and machine oil, and something worse, lingering in the background.

‘You need to drink something,’ he said. ‘And eat. You’ll feel better then. It was a harmless sedative. An anaesthetic. You’ll have a headache, feel sick – until you drink more and eat more. You need to do that to recover. There’s food here …’ He turned his back to her and walked over to what looked like a rusted, metal workbench with a naked light bulb dangling above it. There was a battered wooden stool placed in front of it, a small fridge to the side of it. The bench was right against the wall of the place. Her eyes took in the space beyond it. It was some kind of long, windowless room with metal walls. Six foot across, maybe thirty feet long, eight feet high. More like a corridor than a room. She couldn’t work out what it was. ‘What have you done to me?’ She tried to shout, but the words came out feeble. ‘What did you do? You fucking cunt. What have you done to me?’

He came back towards her with a plate in one hand. ‘Nothing bad,’ he said calmly. ‘Why would I? I need you alive. So stop worrying and stop shouting. I only took this from your arm …’ He held up something too small to see. ‘That’s all I’ve done. Aside from that I haven’t touched you. No one has.’

She frowned, trying to see it properly.
He took it from her arm?
Her arm was throbbing, right in the armpit. She remembered the transmitter just as he spoke again.