The Vanishing (9 page)

‘It’s Easter coming up,’ she said. ‘Next week, right? You doing anything? What about Tom? Will you see Tom? Or Eric? Tell me your plans. Talk to me.’

He frowned and waited for her to finish. Easter had been last Sunday. He’d spent it with her. They’d had roast lamb. ‘I have no idea where Tom is,’ he said, sighing. ‘Eric is in the States. He’ll be with his mother. I don’t expect to hear from any of them.’ Rachel knew all this too – he’d told her it all most recently about five hours ago – but her head was filled with other things right now. He knew the routine. She was talking for the sake of it, to keep the thoughts at bay.

Eric was his eldest lad – thirty-three, married with two kids. He worked for a software company based in California, and lived there. He’d always been his mother’s boy, and since Jane and John had split up – eighteen years ago – they had only grown farther apart. Relations were cordial, but face-to-face meetings were very infrequent. Eric visited the UK often enough, but not to see his dad.

More depressing, something had also gone wrong with Tom, his youngest. When Tom was little they had been very close. He had grown into a good kid, rock solid, had even followed John into the police, though that had never been John’s desire for him. Then suddenly there had been all the trouble, three years ago, ending with Tom being sacked from the Met. John blamed himself, because the tosser who had brought it all on Tom had been there throughout Tom’s childhood, hanging around the edges, just waiting to do the damage. A ‘friend’ Tom should never have had. John should have seen that more clearly, he knew, done something to separate them earlier. But he hadn’t; instead he had thought Tom would grow out of it, ditch the ‘friendship’ at the very latest when they all left school. But Tom was nothing if not loyal, though maybe he also blamed his father for that, because it seemed now like he hated him. Since he’d lost the job there had been barely any contact between them.

‘I’m leaving here in about ten minutes, Rachel,’ he said. ‘I’ll be at yours within an hour. Is that OK? Will you be OK till then?’

‘Yes. Of course. Good. I’m glad you’re coming, John. I’ll put something on. Cook for us. What do you want? You want to go out and eat? Or shall I put something on?’

John looked at his wristwatch. It was ten past one in the morning. ‘It’s a bit late to go out,’ he said gently. There was a long silence. He waited a bit, thinking she might be checking the time, then started to worry. ‘OK. Put something on,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry. Cook something. Good idea. We don’t want to go out …’

‘No. Maybe not …’

‘Too warm to go out. We can sit on your terrace instead. Drink some wine …’ In the middle of the night, he thought. But so what? Go along with it. At least until he got over there. It was a mistake to suggest a drink, though. She couldn’t drink anything, of course. She needed all her wits about her. Wine would relax her, and then she would start thinking about it all. This happened every year for a couple of days, around the anniversary date. Only a few days, and it usually vanished as quickly as it came, like a switch in her personality. ‘
Can
you cook something for us?’ he asked. He tried to think of something complicated. ‘Do you know how to do Beef Wellington?’

‘Beef Wellington?’

‘Yes. Beef in pastry …’

‘I don’t have any beef …’

‘Can you do pastry? Puff pastry, I think?’ Or was it some other kind? He didn’t really know. It didn’t matter. She could look it up. That was something else to do, something else to occupy her thoughts.

‘Yes. But I don’t have beef …’

‘I’ll bring the beef. Look it up in a recipe book. I’ll get some beef out of the freezer and bring it, you do the pastry now. Can you do that?’

‘Yes. I’ll try.’

‘I’ll be an hour. I promise. I’ll leave now. I look forward to it.’

‘OK. Thanks, John. Thanks. I really appreciate this.’

He said goodbye then rang off and rubbed his face. Would she really start to make pastry at one in the morning? And were they really going to make a Beef Wellington, then eat it at four, just before bed? ‘What a fucking mess,’ he said, out loud. ‘What a miserable fucking mess.’

In front of him – from the back of Folder 328 – was a photo of Rachel as a twenty-eight-year-old, as she had been when he had first met her. Well, not quite. Because in her arms was her daughter, Lauren. Lauren had gone missing twenty-two years ago, when she was just thirteen months old. She was the reason Rachel and John Lomax had met, because John Lomax, a thirty-year-old detective inspector at the time, had been appointed Deputy Senior Investigating Officer on Operation Grenser, the inquiry into Lauren’s disappearance. The Rachel Gower he had met back then, though very different to the fifty-year-old woman he knew so well now, was already something different to the woman in this photo. In this photo – taken about three weeks before Lauren vanished – Rachel was happy, her world intact.

Their friendship – was that what it should be called? – had started about two years after Lauren’s disappearance. At first he had regarded it as part of his job that he should spend at least part of the anniversary with Rachel, counselling her, comforting her, bringing her up to date with what they were doing. Rachel and Roger, in fact, because her husband had been there also in the earlier years. But Roger had left her in 1993. For all the obvious reasons their relationship hadn’t stood a chance. And Roger had pretty quickly decided that his daughter was dead. They had divorced, but Rachel had kept his name, because that was Lauren’s name. For Rachel, Lauren would never be dead unless they found a body. But they had found nothing. And John’s yearly visits had continued, and turned gradually into something else. Very gradually.

Now – twenty-two years on – he saw her once or twice a week, and they were clearly having some kind of odd relationship, that neither truly understood. Since his retirement it had been building up to something, he thought. The new thing was the physicality. There was enough of it – of the sort that couldn’t be written off as what friends or siblings might share – to make things frequently charged between them. But so far it had all led nowhere. They hadn’t spoken about it, and he guessed neither of them knew what was going on, or what they wanted. It was going to end in some kind of crisis, he assumed – without having a clue why – but that wouldn’t happen today. Today was too close to the dread date, the anniversary. For the last few days she had been like a completely different person. One who needed every ounce of energy focused on avoiding the memories and suppressing the images, both real and imaginary.

The original Grenser Senior Investigating Officer had retired in 1995, and died of a heart attack a year after that. Which had left John as the most senior officer who had worked the case for the two years it had been really active. He had been made SIO in due course, and had carried out frequent reviews, including the grand reopening during 2003, with a full squad and ambitious forensic strategies centred on new possibilities in DNA technology. But nothing had come of it all. He had been left with it – the case that wouldn’t go away. It had become his obsession, no longer a secret obsession since the reopening in 2003, because he had gone public with his hopes then, and colleagues had immediately realised that it wasn’t just another job for him.

Not surprisingly. As Deputy SIO he had practically run the hunt for Lauren back in 1990 and 1991 – it had been his entire life for over two years, exactly as it had been Rachel’s entire life ever since then. He had lived and breathed every detail of the inquiry. Indeed, as the material had mounted to nearly a hundred thousand pages he was the only person on the team who had actual knowledge of every single item. Statement readers and detective sergeants running the various teams, HOLMES compilers and his own deputies had all come and gone over the years. He was the only point of continuity. He had known everything there was to know about the case, and still did, though it was harder now to remember details.

On shelves around his study he had all his policy books, plus hard copies of nearly half the material gathered. And even now, two years after he had retired, they were only too happy to allow him to borrow box after box from the store. No one else was looking at it, no one else cared. He was a cheap review facility. All they had to pay for was the photocopying.

He did it because he was haunted by a single idea and a single image. The image was a simple photo of Lauren, taken by her mother on 13 April 1990 – Friday the thirteenth, unlucky Friday – the day before she was snatched. In it Lauren’s beautiful, wide-open, unsuspecting blue eyes looked directly at the camera and she was smiling, her head a mass of gorgeous black curls, just like her mother’s. John couldn’t look at the image without a lump catching in his throat. Because he knew the reality of these cases, he knew what had probably happened; he knew what Lauren – the harmless, helpless child in that image – must have been put through in the hours following her disappearance. And that was his fault, because he had been charged with finding her, and he had failed.

The idea was more rational, and more persuasive: they had spent more than three years at Grenser, full time, with over fifty dedicated detectives working to trace Lauren, they had gathered nearly a hundred thousand pages of statements and information. It was more than enough. John was convinced that
somewhere
in all of that material, the answer was
already
found. It
had
to be.

And he had missed it.

So for the last year he had been going through it all again, box by box.

They crouched knee-deep in decaying vegetation, squeezed under the rotting, broken trunk of a fallen tree, with their backs against an outcrop of slippery, moss-covered rock. The spot was in darkness, in a dense, boggy part of the jungle, infested with flies that bit at will, unchecked. He could barely see her face beside him. All around them there was a high-pitched shrilling. He couldn’t locate the insect that was making it, but there must have been thousands of them. At some point the noise was so loud it sounded like they were next to a racing track. Where his feet were buried in the leaf mould or mud – or whatever it was – he could sometimes feel things wriggling or crawling against his shins. When he moved his feet the mud sucked at them, then gave off bubbles of gas that smelled like bad eggs and would probably poison them, if they breathed enough of it. He was trying to keep focus. Survival was all that mattered, which right now meant getting under cover. This stinking swamp was cover. Above them, through the trees, they could still hear intermittent gunfire.

‘Is it dangerous here?’ he asked, keeping his voice low. He wanted to know the extent of the threat. Maybe there would be some species of deadly wildlife he had no idea about.

She didn’t answer him. She was right beside him, pressed up against him, the gun across her knees so that the stock was half on his also. He could see her outline, see her shoulders trembling. She had her head down. She was struggling with her own images and thoughts, trying to keep the lid on them. They had run for maybe thirty minutes through the jungle, keeping off the trails, going straight through anything in their way, so that their faces, hands, arms and legs were scratched and bleeding. They were still catching their breath. Tom thought they might have put about one thousand five hundred yards between themselves and the compound. It seemed a long way, in relative darkness, but come daylight it would be only a short walk. ‘It’s not far enough,’ he said to her. ‘We have to keep going. What’s making that noise?’ Whatever it was had got suddenly louder, becoming so raucous he could no longer whisper.

‘It’s a tree frog,’ she said. ‘It’s harmless, tiny. There are thousands of them. We’re at the edge of a mangrove swamp. In six hours this place will be flooded.’

The guns started up again – short bursts of automatic fire, quite far off, though. ‘They brought plenty of ammo,’ he said. ‘But they’ll start running low. Those things must fire off a whole clip in a few seconds.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about those guns.’

‘I thought you must be an expert.’ She was going to break down again, he thought. He needed her to keep her brain working, not give in to it. She was the only one who might know where they were and how to get to the phone. ‘You do a lot of hunting? Is that how you know how to shoot?’ It seemed like the thing someone with her background might go for.

‘Hunting?’ Her face turned towards him. He could just see the whites of her eyes. ‘We’re here on a project to save animals, not kill them.’

‘But you know how to shoot. Did your father teach you?’ Keep her talking. Keep her mind off it.

‘My father? That’s a nice idea. I hardly know my father. Jean-Marc trained me, for protection. I’ve been shooting this one gun – and a few pistols – for about two years. That’s it. We don’t shoot animals. Just targets. For self-defence. In case something like this happened. It’s not actually a hunting rifle. It’s a sniper rifle, an AIAW. The same kind the British army uses.’

OK – for hunting
people
, then, not animals. ‘He taught you well.’

She nodded, then started to sob out loud as she remembered what had just happened to Jean-Marc. Jean-Marc was dead, he assumed, one of the pile of people they had tossed out the back. ‘Let’s not assume anything,’ he said, and right then the frog noise stopped suddenly, all of them together, as if on cue, leaving a silence so deafening it sounded like he had shouted. He reverted to whispering. ‘Let’s not imagine things. We need to get help. That’s the priority.’

‘He’s dead,’ she said, also whispering. ‘The one on the radio was talking about him. Jean-Marc told me he was going to make a run for the south trail. I spoke to him on the two-way before they got to my room. It was one of the drills we did – he runs that way to try to draw them off, while I get out to the north. He did it to protect me …’

‘He might have got away, then.’

‘That’s not what they said.’

‘No.’ She was right, but he didn’t want her dwelling on it. ‘They knew about your birthday. Did you hear that? Were they right? Is it your birthday in five days?’