Authors: Tim Weaver
A
real conversation stopper. They shifted uncomfortably. Caroline turned her gaze
back to the table, then picked up her menu. He cleared his throat. Before the
silence got too long, Carver reached into his jacket and brought out a
photograph. Something moved in his eyes, a sadness, and then he turned it
around and placed it in front of me.
'That's
Megan,' he said.
When
Caroline had originally called, I gave her directions to the office - but she
said she wanted to meet somewhere neutral, as if coming to see me was
confirmation her daughter was gone for good. After we'd arranged a time and a
place, she told me a little about Megan: a good girl, part of a close family,
no boyfriends, no reason to leave.
She'd
been gone nearly seven months.
Two
hundred thousand people go missing in the UK each year — thirty thousand in
London alone — but the most powerful media story of them all is the young white
female from a middle-class, two-parent family. When Megan first disappeared,
there was a lot of media coverage: locally, nationally, some of it even playing
out abroad. It ran for weeks, one headline after the next, every TV channel in
the country reporting from outside the gates of her home. There was a name for
cases like hers that unravelled in the full glare of the camera lens: MWWS.
Missing
White Woman Syndrome.
In
the photograph they'd handed me, Megan was sitting with her mum on a beach. The
sand was white, flecked with small stones and twigs and falling away to a
sapphire sea. Behind Caroline and Megan, playing, was a small boy, probably
four years old. He was half turned to the camera, his eyes looking into the
hole he was digging.
Carver
pointed at the boy. That's our son. Leigh.' He looked at me and could see what
I was thinking: there was a thirteen-year age gap between their kids. 'I guess
you could say…' He glanced at his wife. 'Leigh was a very pleasant surprise.'
'How
old is the photograph?'
'About
eight months.'
'Just
before she disappeared?'
'Yes,
our last holiday together, in Florida.'
Megan
was very much her father's daughter. She had the same face, right down to
identical creases next to the eyes, and was built like him too. Big, but not
fat. She was an attractive seventeen-year-old girl: long blonde hair,
beautifully kept, and olive skin that had browned appealingly in the sun.
'Tell
me what happened the day she went missing.'
Both
of them nodded but made no move to start. They knew this was where it began;
the pain of scooping up memories, of going over old ground, of talking about
their daughter in the past tense. I got out a pad and a pen as a gentle nudge.
Carver turned to his wife, but she gestured for him to tell the story.
'I'm
not sure there's a lot to it,' he said finally. His voice was unsteady at
first, but he began to find more rhythm. 'We dropped Meg off at school, and
when we went to pick her up again later, she didn't come back out.'
'Did
she seem okay when you dropped her off that morning?'
'Yes.'
'Nothing
was up?'
He
shook his head. 'No.'
'Megan
didn't have a boyfriend at the time, is that right?'
'That's
right,' Caroline said sharply.
Carver
looked at his wife, then squeezed her hand. 'Not one that she told us about.
That doesn’t mean there wasn't one.'
'Did
she have any boyfriends before then?'
'A
couple,' Caroline said, 'but nothing serious.'
'Did
you meet them?'
'Briefly.
But she used to say that when she finally brought a boy home for longer than a
few minutes, we'd know it was the real thing' She attempted a smile. 'Hopefully
we'll still get to see that day.'
I
paused for a moment while Carver shifted up the booth and slid his arm around
his wife. He looked into her eyes, and back to me.
'She
never expressed a need to travel or leave London?' I asked.
Carver
shook his head. 'Not unless you count university.'
'What
about her friends - have you spoken to them?'
'Not
personally. The police did that in the weeks after she disappeared.'
'No
one knew anything?'
'No.'
I picked
up the pen. 'I'll take the names and addresses of her closest friends, anyway.
It'll be worth seeing them a second time.'
Caroline
reached down to her handbag, opened it and brought out a green address book,
small enough to slip into a jacket pocket. She handed it to me.
'All
the addresses you need will be in there, including her school,' she said.
That's Meg's book. She used to call it her Book of Life. Names, numbers,
notes.'
I nodded
my thanks and took it from her. What sort of stage would you say you're at with
the police?'
‘We're
not really
at
a stage. We speak to them once a fortnight.' Carver
stopped, shrugged. He glanced at his wife. 'To start with we made a lot of headway
in a short space of time. The police told us they had some good leads. I guess
we got our hopes up.'
'Did
they tell you what leads they had?'
'No.
It was difficult for them at the beginning' He paused. We put out that reward
for information, so they had to field a lot of calls. Jamie Hart told us he
didn't want to give us false hope, so he said he and his team would sort
through the calls and collate the paperwork and then come back to us.'
'Jamie
Hart was heading up the investigation?' 'Right.'
The
waiter arrived to take our orders as I wrote Hart's name on my pad. I'd heard
of him: once during my paper days when he'd led a task force trying to find a
serial rapist; and once in a
Times
news story I'd pulled out of the
archives on a previous case.
'So,
did Hart get back to you?' I asked after the waiter was gone.
Carver
rocked his head from side to side. The answer was no but he was trying to be
diplomatic. 'Not in the way we would have hoped.'
'How
do you mean?'
'At
the beginning, they were calling us every day, asking us questions, coming to
the house and taking things away. Then, a couple of months into the
investigation, it all ground to a halt. The calls stopped coming as often.
Officers
stopped coming to the house. Now all we hear is that there's nothing new to
report.' His mouth flattened. A flicker of pain. 'They would tell us if there
was something worth knowing, wouldn't they?'
'They
should do.'
He
paused for a moment, his hand moving to his drink.
‘What
was the date of Megan's disappearance?'
'Monday
3 April,' Carver said.
It
was now 19 October. One hundred and ninety-nine days and they hadn't heard a
thing. The police tended not to get interested for forty-eight hours after a
disappearance, but in my experience the first couple of days were crucial in
missing persons. The longer you left it, the more you were playing with
percentages. Sometimes you found the person five days, or a week, or two weeks
after they vanished. But most of the time, if they didn't resurface in the
first forty-eight hours it was either because they'd disappeared for good and
didn't want to come home again — or their body was waiting to be found.
'When
was the last time anyone saw her?'
‘The
afternoon of the third,' Carver said. 'She went to her first class after lunch,
but didn't make the next one. She was supposed to meet her friend Kaitlin at
their lockers because they both did Biology. But Megan never arrived.'
'Biology
was the last lesson of the day?'
'Yes.'
'Does
the school have CCTV?'
'Yes
- but very limited coverage. Jamie told us they checked all the cameras, but
none of them revealed anything'
'Have
you told him you've come to me?'
Carver
shook his head. 'No.'
It was
better that way. The best approach was going to be cold-calling Hart. The
police, understandably, didn't like outsiders stepping on their toes —
especially on active cases - and if they picked up my scent, they'd close ranks
and circle the wagons before I even got near.
'So
what's the next stage?' Carver asked.
'At a
time that's convenient for you, I'd like to come and speak to you at the house;
have a look around Megan's bedroom. I don't expect to find anything
significant, but it's something I like to do.'
They
nodded. Neither of them spoke.
'After
that, I'll start working my way through this,' I said, placing a hand on her
Book of Life. 'The police have had a look at this presumably?'
'Yes,'
Carver said.
'Did
they find anything?'
He
shrugged. They gave it back to us.'
Which
meant no. A moment later, the waiter returned with our meals.
'Do
you think there's a chance she's alive?' Caroline asked after he was gone.
We
both looked at her, Carver turning in his seat, shifting his bulk, as if he was
surprised and disappointed by the question. Maybe she'd never asked it before.
Or maybe he didn't want to know the answer.
I
looked at her, then at him, then back to her.
'There's
always a chance.'
Yes,'
she replied. 'But do you think she's alive?'
I
looked down at my meal, a lobster broken into pieces, not wanting my eyes to
betray me. But I had to look at her eventually. And when I did, she must have
seen the answer, because she slowly nodded, then started to cry.
Outside,
James Carver shook my hand and we watched his wife slowly wander off along
Victoria Embankment, the Houses of Parliament framed behind her. Boats moved on
the Thames, the water dark and grey. Autumn was finally clawing its way out of
hibernation after a warm, muggy summer.
'I
don't know what you want to do about money,' he said.
'Let's
talk tomorrow.'
He
nodded. 'I'll be around, but Caroline might not be - she's got some work at a
school in South Hackney.'
That's
fine. I'll catch up with her when she's free.'
I
watched Carver head after his wife. When he got to her, he reached for her
hand. She responded, but coolly, her fingers hard and rigid. When he spoke, she
just shrugged and continued walking. They headed down to Westminster Pier and,
as they crossed the road towards the tube station, she looked back over her
shoulder at me. For a second I could see the truth: that something had remained
hidden in our conversation; a trace of a secret, buried out of her husband's
sight.
I
just had to find out what.
The
day had started to darken by five-thirty. I stopped in at the office on the way
back from the restaurant. I'd left some notes in there, including some I'd made
that morning on Megan Carver. By the time I got home, at just gone seven, the
house was black. I hadn't set the alarm, so when
I got
in the sensors beeped gently as I moved around: first in the kitchen, then in the
living room, then in the main bedroom at the end of the hall. I dumped my
stuff, showered, and then spent a moment on the edge of the bed, looking at
some photographs of Derryn and me.
One,
right at the bottom of the pile, was of the two of us at the entrance to
Imperial Beach in San Diego, back when I'd been seconded to the US to cover the
2004 elections. I was pulling her into the crook of my arm, sunglasses covering
my eyes, dark hair wet from the surf. In the wetsuit I looked broad, well built
and lean, every inch of my six-two. Next to me, Derryn seemed smaller than she
really was, as if relying on me to keep her protected from something off
camera. I liked the photo. It made me remember what it felt like to be the
person she needed.