Authors: Tim Weaver
As I
stepped up on to the porch, my security light kicked in. Next door, she clocked
the movement. Her eyes narrowed, and then I passed into the full glow of the
light. She broke out into a smile and got to her feet, waving me towards her. I
nodded, moved back down the drive, and up the path to her front porch. The door
was already open, framing her as she stood in the kitchen searching in a
cupboard.
'Hello,
Mr Raker,' she said, looking up as she brought down a top-of-the-range grinder.
On the counter was a bag of coffee beans, wrapped in silver foil.
'Elizabeth.
How are you?'
She
shook her head. She hated being called Elizabeth.
'I'm
good. You?'
'Fine.
You been in court today?'
'Tomorrow.'
'Oh —
so are you sure you want me bothering you?'
You're
a nice distraction,' she said, and flashed me a smile.
The house
was tidy and still had that 'just moved in' feel, even though she had lived
there for nearly two years. The living room had a gorgeous open fireplace,
finished in black marble with a stone surround. Logs were piled up in alcoves
either side, and a small wooden angel, its wings spread, was standing where a
fire should have been. The rest of the room was minimalist: two sofas, both
black, a TV in the corner, a pot plant next to that. There was a Denon sound
system beneath the front window. On the only shelf, high above the sofas, were
four pictures, all of Liz and her daughter. She'd married young, had her
daughter shortly after, and divorced soon after that. Despite Liz only being
forty-three, her daughter Katie was already in her third year of university at
Warwick.
I sat
in the living room. She closed the top on the grinder and set it in motion, the
noise like tractor wheels on stony ground, the smell of coffee filling the
house. When she came through, she pulled the kitchen door most of the way shut
and perched herself opposite me.
'So
what have you been up to?'
'It
was support group night.'
'Ah,
right, of course. How was that?'
'Pretty
good. I wasn't sat next to Roger this week.'
She
smiled. 'He's the Mazda RX-8 guy, right?' 'Right.'
'Where
did you eat?'
'Some
Thai place in Kew.'
'Oh,
I know where you mean. I took a client there once. He'd been charged with
receiving stolen goods.' She paused, and broke out into another smile. 'Shifty so-and-
so, he was. Luckily, what jail time I saved him was made up for by the big fat
bill I posted through his letterbox at the end of the trial.'
'Are
you expensive?'
'If
only you knew
how
expensive.' She winked. 'You find yourself in
possession of any dodgy DVD players, David, you know where to come.'
She
smiled again, and we looked at each other, the noise of the coffee grinder
filling the silence.
'So
are you on a case at the moment?'
'You
remember Megan Carver?'
She
paused for a moment. She knew the name, but couldn't think where from.
"Wasn't she that girl who disappeared?' 'Right.'
'Wow.
Big case.'
'Big
enough. I'm trying to find her.'
'If
she's even still alive.'
'Yeah,
well, I think there's a distinct possibility she's not.'
She
didn't pursue it any further, although as her eyes lingered on me I knew she
wanted to. It was more than a natural curiosity. There were obvious parallels
between our work — the damaged clients, the unravelling of lies and half-truths,
the building of a case — but, deep down, I knew her reasons were much simpler
than that: she wanted to feel we were moving somewhere.
'Oh,
I almost forgot,' she said after a while, and disappeared down the hallway.
I
looked up at one of the photos on the shelf again. In it, Liz had her arm
around Katie's neck, and was dressed in a skirt and vest. She looked fantastic.
Dark, playful eyes; long chocolate-coloured hair; slim, gentle curves. We'd
never talked about the relationships she'd had since her daughter was born, but
it seemed impossible that there wouldn't have been some. She was beautiful
without ever suggesting she knew it, which only made her more attractive.
She
returned a couple of minutes later. In her hands was an envelope. 'Here,' she
said, and handed it to me.
'Are
you charging for the coffee?'
'Ha
ha — you're a funny man, Raker. No, one of my old clients just opened a new
place. I don't know what it's like, but maybe you can treat a few of the guys
at the group one week. Working in law, I have no real friends, so it makes more
sense for you to have them.'
She
was smiling.
I
looked inside the envelope. There were eight vouchers with the name of a newly
opened Italian restaurant in Acton at the top. Each one got you a free main
course.
'Are
you sure?' I asked.
'Yeah,
absolutely.'
I
glanced at her, then down at the vouchers again.
Don't think it through.
Just do it.
I looked up. She was watching me again, that same look on her
face.
'Are you
free Friday?'
She
paused. Didn't say anything. 'Don't feel like you need to ask me —'
'I'm
asking you because I want to.'
She
moved back to the sofa, brought her legs up under her so they were crossed,
then broke out into another smile. Yes,' she said. 'I'm free.'
'Then
it looks like we're eating Italian.'
Megan's
plastic storage box was still on the kitchen counter when I got in. I took it
through to the living room and sat down at the table, spreading the contents
out in front of me in three separate piles: jewellery, letters and photographs.
I
went through the jewellery first. Some gold chains. A bracelet. A couple of
rings. In the middle of them all was a necklace. It was unusual, almost out of
place among her other things: a shard of dark glass, possibly obsidian, on a
long black cord. I held it up in front of me and, as I watched it turn slowly
in my hands, realized Megan's initials were inscribed on the back. I set the
necklace down, away from the rest of the jewellery, and turned to the letters.
Handwritten
letters were pretty rare now so I imagined the ones in the box would be at
least a couple of years old. But I was out by another two. There were five, all
unsent, all to her grandparents in Norfolk, the last written in the week after
her thirteenth birthday.
Next,
I headed to the spare room and fired up the computer. Megan's camera used a
standard Sony USB lead, the same as mine. I plugged it in and copied the
pictures across to my desktop. Most of them mirrored the Megan in the
photographs I already had of her, so I turned to the last one at the block of
flats.
Everything
was much clearer. Two metal doors, reinforced glass panels in them. Blobs of
sunlight shining in the glass, with only the merest hint of anything else:
maybe a tree reflected, and perhaps the edge of another building. There were
sandy-yellow bricks behind Megan, on the right-hand side, and she was dressed
in a dark pair of jeans, a black V-neck sweater, a thick bomber jacket and a
red scarf.
And
there was that smile.
I
opened one of the other pictures of her with Leigh at the beach, and positioned
them side by side. Different times. Different places. Different smiles. The
smile on the beach was warm, but created. A smile for the camera, not for
anyone beyond that. This one was different. There was nothing put-on about it.
This smile carved across her face, filled up her eyes and brought colour to the
surface of her cheeks. I needed to find out where she was in the picture.
But,
more than that, I needed to find out who had taken it.
Using
the password the police had given the Carvers, I accessed Megan's email. There
were forty-two messages in her inbox, most of them automatically generated
newsletters from companies she must have bought from or visited in the past.
Three others caught my eye: two from Kaitlin, and one from Lindsey. All of them
had been sent in the aftermath of Megan's disappearance, and — when I opened
them up - they were all asking her to come home, or at least call her parents.
The police had probably questioned the girls about the emails, and checked
their accounts for replies.
Right
at the bottom was a mail from a charity called the London Conservation Trust.
It seemed slightly out of sync with the high-street stores, fast-food
restaurants and cinema times that made up her other emails, so I clicked on it.
It opened on to a bland-looking newsletter detailing the LCT's concern about
urban development, and the impact it was having on wildlife in the city's
parks. It thanked Megan for her donation of £10 and said the money would be put
to use ensuring wildlife was protected in the face of the continued expansion
of the city.
Suddenly,
my phone started ringing.
'David
Raker.'
'David,
it's Spike.'
Spike
was a Russian hacker living in a tiny flat in Camden Town, whom I'd known since
my paper days. Back then, I'd used him a lot. He could get you an address, a
phone number, a credit card statement, even bank account details — basically
anything you wanted. The riskier the job, the more you had to pay him, but back
then — when the story was all that mattered - he'd helped me break some big
ones. I'd only ever met him once in the flesh: he was painfully thin and pale,
as if he barely saw daylight. It was probably something to do with the fact
that he was five years past the expiration of his student visa and never
ventured outdoors.
I'd called
him earlier in the evening, before I went out to the restaurant, and asked him
to get me Megan's mobile phone records for the three months running up to her
disappearance, and for the six months since.
'Spike
— thanks for calling me back.'
'Hey,
no problem - sorry it's so late.' I could hear him tapping something into a
keyboard. 'So I got what you wanted here. There's a
lot
of calls.'
'How
many?'
'Two
hundred and seventy-four, plus four hundred and ninety-two texts.'
'That
should be a fun evening in. Any after 3 April this year?'
'Uh…'
He paused. 'No. None. How come?'
'That's
what I'm trying to find out.' I logged out of Megan's email account, and moved
to mine. 'Any chance you could email me that information? Can you turn it into
a PDF or a JPEG or something?'
'Yeah.
I'll PDF it. It'll be there in a couple of minutes.'
'Nice
one, thanks.'
'You
got my new drop-off details?'
Spike
was a cash-only man, for obvious reasons. He had a locker in a sports centre close
to his flat, and he gave his customers the access code, which he changed every
day. The locker was his bank.
'I
got it. I might need you for something in a bit, though.'
'Yeah,
no problem. You know I'm not a nine-to-five man.'
I
hung up. By the time I'd put in the username and password for my Yahoo account,
the email and PDF were waiting there for me. I dragged off the PDF and opened
it up. Thirty entries per page. Twenty-five and a half pages.
I
went back through to the kitchen and turned on the coffee machine.
Two
hours later, at almost two o'clock in the morning, I'd narrowed her list of
calls down to eighteen different numbers. A couple I recognized off the bat:
her home number; her mum's and dad's mobile phones; a few others from her Book
of Life. The rest I'd never seen before.
I
redialled Spike's number. 'I'm going to email you back a list of eighteen
different phone numbers,' I said once he answered. 'Can you get me as many
details for each one as you can lay your hands on?'