‘A writer at the top of his game’
‘Brilliantly plotted’
‘Impossible to put down’
The Lost Women
The Lost Women
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For Erin, I’m so proud of you
One Year Ago
I pass through the gates of the cemetery.
It’s quiet, the sweeping lawns empty except for headstones and beds of long-fallen leaves. As I walk, I spot the occasional lonely flower, lifted from its place at a grave somewhere and carried away by the wind, and if it’s obvious where it belongs, I do my best to return it. Mostly, though, I just trace the paved path that winds towards the remembrance garden. I try to think how long it’s been and feel a spear of guilt when I can’t recall.
Pushing open the gate, I pass into an enclosed area called ‘The Rest’, tall fir trees on one side. Copses of five graves are gathered together in small, fenced areas, and Derryn’s is towards the back. In the low winter sun, a shadow lies across her name, across the date of her birth and the day I lost her. Under those are two inscriptions. The first says, Beloved wife of David. But it’s the second I stare at now: In the end, all that matters is love.
I drop to my haunches in front of the headstone.
‘Hey, sweetheart,’ I say quietly.
Wind passes through the cemetery, stirring the leaves. I brush some dirt from her name, from the base, and then take out the box I’ve brought with me. ‘I thought you might like this,’ I say, opening it. ‘You always loved the warm weather, and let’s be honest’ – I look up at the turbulent sky – ‘we don’t get very much of that.’
I place the potted cactus down, smiling to myself as I look at it. There’s a line printed on the side: I’m a prick . . . ly cactus. I imagine her face, her reaction, all of it still clear to me, even after so long. And as I look at her name again, I feel the emotion gather in my throat.
‘Do you remember the diary that you left for me?’
I hear my words catch.
‘I still read it often, even now. I just . . .’ I stop, looking around me. ‘This place, it’s always made me feel close to you, but not like the diary does.’ I stop for a second time, and it takes me longer to find my way back. ‘You’re just so alive in those pages. I can hear you. I can feel you. After all this time, you’d think your words wouldn’t hit me so hard. But they do. They always do . . .’
My voice falters.
‘I don’t know . . . talking to a diary, it just felt weird.’ A smile traces the corners of my lips, because I can almost hear her response on the wind. What, weirder than talking to a grave? ‘You’re right. Coming here is pretty weird too.’
Again, my eyes go to the inscription beneath her name.
In the end, all that matters is love.
‘I need to tell you something,’ I say.
I adjust the potted cactus on the base of the grave.
‘The last few months,’ I start to say, but then the words get lost. It’s sixteen years since she died, and the pain is no longer the same as it was.
But it’s still there.
It’s still pain.
I start again: ‘I keep finding myself coming back to something you wrote in that diary. “You need to promise me that you won’t become stuck.” I think maybe I did become stuck without you. I mean, you were my wife. You were everything. You were my entire world. I think, in a way, I’ve been stuck for most of the last sixteen years.’ I touch the ends of my fingers to her name. ‘And maybe you already know what I’m going to say, but . . .’ I take a breath.
‘I think, finally, I’ve become unstuck.’
I trace the D of Derryn, the R of Raker.
In the end, all that matters is love.
‘I’ve met someone,’ I say. ‘Her name is Rebekah.’
Rebekah picks up her glass of wine and tucks her legs under herself.
‘How was your day?’ she asks.
‘It was good.’ I think of my visit to the cemetery earlier on. ‘Yours?’
‘Busy. Lots of paperwork to get signed off before I fly home.’ The reminder that she will be leaving in a couple of days draws us back into silence for a while. ‘Are you working a case at the moment?’
‘No. Just dealing with some stuff from the last one.’
‘It must be hard to let go of them sometimes.’
‘The cases?’ I nod. ‘Yeah. It can be.’
‘What about before you began finding missing people? Was there ever a story you had as a journalist that you’ve never stopped thinking about?’
I pause, pick up my own wine glass, looking at her. She probably thinks I’m trying to decide which of the thousands of stories I wrote is the one I can’t let go of.
But, in reality, I already know.
Because it’s always the same story.
It’s always the Lost Women.
It’s a bitterly cold day in the middle of April, eighteen years ago.
I’m not the man who visits the cemetery to talk to my wife. I’m not the man who shares a bottle of wine with Rebekah that same evening and longs for her not to go back home to the States. I’m not even a man who finds missing people. Not yet.
I’m a different man with a different life.
I’ve just driven seven hours from London to Cornwall.
The closest car park to where the disappearance happened is on the other side of the water from the island, and I don’t have a problem finding a space today. The last time I was here, this place was swarming. Today, I’m alone.
It feels like the last stop at the end of the world.
I lock my car, zip up my coat and start to head down a slope towards the
shore. There’s a raised path of wooden slats at the bottom that will take me across the water that lies between the mainland and Porthtreno. As I walk, I take in this side of the island, its seas of beachgrass, their perpetual ballet of movement. But eventually, inevitably, my gaze keeps returning to the same place, to the rooftops of the buildings at its centre.
As I step on to the walkway, my phone starts ringing.
It’s Derryn.
‘Hey, sweetheart,’ I say, answering the phone, a gust of wind ripping across me. When I don’t hear my wife’s reply, I realize the wind must have hidden her response. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘In the middle of a tornado here. Say that again.’
‘I just wanted to make sure you got there okay.’
‘Yeah, I did. Just arrived. It took forever. Are you all right?’
‘I’m good.’
‘Are you sure?’
It’s been ten days since her last session of chemotherapy. She seemed to cope with the first treatment pretty well, but the second round has hit her hard. As I listen to her voice, I start to regret leaving her.
‘No,’ she says.
‘No what?’
‘No, you’re not coming home again just because I feel tired.’
‘That wasn’t what I was –’
‘Raker.’ She cuts me dead with one word, and I smile to myself. ‘Do you know how much of a pain in the arse you are to live with when you’re hung up on a story like this?’ And then she quickly adds: ‘That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, before you give me some clever answer. The correct response is, of course, “I’m a huge pain in the arse, wife-of-mine.” You drove five, six, whatever-it-was hours to do your thing, so go and do your thing. I really only had one reason for calling, and that was to remind you that if you fail to pick me up a lot – and I mean, a lot – of Devonshire clotted cream, our marriage is over.’
‘I won’t forget,’ I say, as my heart swells for her. ‘I promise.’
‘I know you won’t. I love you, D.’
‘I love you too, sweetheart.’
I ring off, pocket my phone, and pick up my pace across the wooden-slatted walkway. Ahead of me, on this side of Porthtreno, thick knots of beachgrass shimmer in the wind on large, sloped banks of sand. The sandbanks have created a twelve-foot-high natural wall and the only way past them is over – or through.
I opt for through.
Moving off the walkway and on to the white sand, I pass along a thin path that snakes between two dunes, and then up a steep slope to the undulating spine of the island. From here, Porthtreno’s highest point, I have an uninterrupted, 360-degree view of the island, of the car park I left behind, of the ragged frill of coastline it sits on, and of the vast, grey Atlantic beyond. But it doesn’t take very long for my attention to shift away from all of that.
Because I didn’t come here for the views.
I came here for the village.
It sits in a hollow just below me. As I get out my camera and take a couple of pictures, I wonder what it would have looked like five months ago when the three women came to make their documentary. There would have been half-walls and punctured roofs, open doorways and glassless windows, just like there are today.
But it wouldn’t have looked the same.
That’s what makes the tiny village of St Petroc, in the middle of the island of Porthtreno, so unique: every day – on the back of every surge of wind, after every storm that rolls in off the ocean, and every fractional movement of the island’s sand – its appearance alters.
There’s no human life here any more.
But the village is still alive.
It lives and it breathes and it changes.
‘What do you mean, “it changes”?’ Rebekah asks, pouring us some more wine.
I get up off the sofa and go to the sideboard in the living room. Somewhere in it are the photos I took that day.
The sleeve has yellowed over time, and the photos inside have
faded a little, but as I take them out, I’m instantly transported back over a decade and a half.
I hand them over.
‘St Petroc was the name of a village they built on Porthtreno about a hundred and fifty years ago. Five houses on a slope. They were in this hollow, to try to protect them from the winds that roll in off the Atlantic, especially in the winter, and to get the men closer to the sea to fish. But all the hollow did was create a place for the sand to fall into and gather.’ I watch her leaf through the pictures. ‘It started as a slow drip over the first few months, but then it became an avalanche – these immense walls of sand would suddenly slough off the high dunes and tumble into the hollow, breaking windows and flooding the houses. The villagers would try to clear it out, try to create trenches for the sand to go into, and begin again – but the sand would just keep coming. It was like this relentless force, this invasion they could never repel, no matter what they did.’
‘So eventually all the villagers left?’
‘After a year, yes. They had to.’
I glance at the photograph she has in her hands, a shot I took from inside one of the houses. I was knee-deep in sand at the time, the walls of the house rising up out of it for only four or five feet, my head almost touching what was left of a shattered roof.
‘And this final house is where the three women were filming?’ I nod. ‘That’s where they vanished from.’
I’ve only descended about three feet into the hollow when I hit the sand.
I feel my boots submerge, my calves, and when it gets to my knees, I hit some kind of limit. It’s not the bottom – if it was the bottom, my eyeline wouldn’t be well above the windows, in a space between the tops of them and what was once the roof – but decades of sand have compacted below me, so this is as far as I can sink down.
I take a few pictures and then wade through the house before passing into
the torn sides of the next home. It has a chimney breast still standing, an accusing brick finger pointing at the sky.
But it’s the last house of five that I need.
With effort, I wade forward, through the crumbling interiors of houses that are drowning in sand. Four houses down, I reach a former garden, a sharp sandbank to my left, dotted with more beachgrass. At the other end of this garden is the final home and, as I approach it, I feel the sand level starting to rise.
It’s almost at my thighs.
Irrational as it is, I start to panic, start to see images behind my eyes of suddenly hitting an area of the village where there is no base, no compact layer of sand underfoot, and I start to sink, and the sand is streaming into my mouth.
But that doesn’t happen.
Instead, the sand level lowers again as I stop in the doorway and look into the fifth house. Like all of them, it has a chimney breast which, along with the large back wall it’s built on to – is mostly intact. It’s the chimney where the women’s equipment was found, laid out in an orderly fashion as if they were about to call action on a shot. A camera on a tripod; a mic on the end of a boom; a recording pack and pair of headphones; a list of shots they’d had planned. There was a backpack with their personal belongings in it. There were the keys for the car they’d left in the car park.
The only things missing were the women.
‘What were the women doing at Porthtreno?’
‘Shooting a documentary,’ I say to Rebekah. ‘They were film-makers.’
She looks again at the photographs I took of the village, at the banks of sand that had poured in through windows and open doorways; at the broken, submerged walls.
‘And no one ever found them?’
I shake my head. ‘No. CCTV cameras recorded them arriving but not leaving. And if they’re in the sea, they’ve never washed up anywhere.’
‘What about footprints?’
‘The sand’s always been too deep and dry in the houses to make footprints, and outside of the hollow there were footprints everywhere.’
‘Did they make any phone calls that day? Send any texts?’
‘Not from the island, no.’
‘Beforehand?’
‘Nothing useful.’
She pauses, looking at the photographs again, and I can see that she’s trying to find an angle, an explanation for what happened to the three women back in September 2006. But every angle, every possible explanation for what went on, has already been exhausted.
It’s why I’ve never forgotten their story.
It’s why, in my memories, the Lost Women always remain.
Now
Today, a year on from my visit to the cemetery, a year on from that conversation with Rebekah, the only thing I have left to cling on to are my memories.
They’re the last pieces of driftwood in the ocean. Maybe the only things keeping me sane.
I dwell on images of Derryn, of my daughter Annabel, of Rebekah, and of the Lost Women of Porthtreno. And then I think about the cases I’ve had, of the people who’ve vanished, and how those cases have twisted and broken me and left scars. I think about the snatches of time I wish I’d made more of, or done differently, or paid more attention to. I think about the regrets I still carry. And I think about the missing person that brought me to this moment.
His name was Preston Stewart.
When I took on his case, I knew I was against the clock from the second I set out to find him, but I still thought I could work it in the same way as all my other missing persons searches.
That was naive.
The more I unpicked Preston’s life, the more the search for him metastasized into something worse than a disappearance: something heartbreaking, and terrible, and deadly; something that would profoundly and irreversibly change my entire life.
On day one, I was oblivious to it.
On day two, when I finally understood, it was already too late. If I’d known the clock was ticking when I’d answered the door on that first morning, I would have tried to work harder, made use of every second I had.
But that was just the problem. I didn’t know I only had forty-eight hours. And it was why I never saw what was coming.
DAY ONE
Part One
. . . 48 hours to go . . .
The car pulled up outside my house at 8 a.m.
It was a black Mercedes with tinted windows.
I watched the driver get out. He was in his early fifties, sharpsuited and square-jawed, and even though it was a cold, grey day in the middle of January, he was wearing a pair of aviators. He was also absolutely massive – six-five, at least eighteen stone –and as he came to the front door, he had to duck slightly to get under the porch roof.
‘Mr Raker,’ he said, as I opened up.
‘Just give me a minute,’ I replied, and he stepped off the porch without saying another word and retreated to the car.
I padded upstairs. The door to the spare bedroom was ajar, and through the gap I could see Rebekah facing me, the duvet twisted around her, her unpacked suitcase on the floor.
She must have sensed I was looking in, because a moment later she stirred. A smile crept across her face. ‘You’re not seeing me at my best.’
‘That’s the jet lag talking.’
‘You old charmer. Are you heading out?’
‘Yeah. I’m not sure what time I’ll be back.’
‘It’s fine. I’ll be in Cambridge all day.’
Rebekah had been born and raised in England but had moved to the States at eighteen. We’d met by chance in Manhattan when I’d been visiting a friend, and two years ago she’d hired me to find out what had happened to her mother, who’d walked out on her when she was only three. As I’d searched for answers, we’d
grown close, and grown even closer in the period since, but we were still taking it slowly, even all this time later. She was separated, and had two daughters under six at home. I lived 3,500 miles from her, had a daughter of my own and my work was all here. Ostensibly, she flew here to deal with legalities related to a house that had been left to her in Cambridge by her mother, but the two of us had been the other reason. Every time I was with her, I felt the kind of buzz I hadn’t known since Derryn, but that didn’t stop me worrying: we both had roots on opposite sides of the ocean – and those roots were going to be hard to cut loose.
‘Get an autograph for me,’ she said.
I nodded. ‘I’ll do my best.’
I headed out of the house and down to the Mercedes. The back passenger door had been left open. As I slid in, the woman seated next to me said, ‘Good morning.’
‘Morning,’ I replied, and glanced at a coffee from Starbucks nestled in a cup holder on the armrest. It had Matt scrawled on the side, which I guessed must be the driver’s name. It made sense that he’d been the one to go in. If Ellie Snyder had done it herself, she would still have been signing autographs.
‘Thank you for agreeing to do this.’
‘This is a new experience for me,’ I said to her.
‘Being driven around?’
‘Kicking off a missing persons search from the back of a car.’
She smiled, revealing an immaculate set of teeth, and even as the smile began to drift away, even as a sadness replaced it, it did nothing to erode her beauty. Ellory Snyder – Ellie to everyone, whether they knew her outside of their TV screens or not – was a strikingly beautiful thirty-year-old, the child of a Dutch father and a Nigerian mother. Her features were perfect, all gentle sweeps and flawless skin, her eyes a remarkable blue, and her talents didn’t stop at being the lead in the UK’s mostwatched television drama. The previous night I’d followed links to a podcast network she’d co-founded, to a foundation she’d
set up for disadvantaged kids, and to stories about her role as a UN Special Envoy, where ‘her powerful voice helped support and build awareness for refugees’. But, despite all of the good she’d done, despite the limo, the fame and the wealth, right now Ellie was going through the same thing as every other person who came to me for help. Someone she cared about was gone.
In the end, grief was the great equalizer.
‘Do you mind if I record this?’ I asked, removing my phone. ‘Taking written notes is going to be hard in a moving vehicle.’
She looked at my phone with a mixture of suspicion and fear. I’d only ever seen snatches of Church Row Manor, the Victorian costume drama Ellie headlined. It was itself a spin-off from Royalty Park, a mega-hit British–American co-production that had first introduced Ellie’s character, Marcella van Straal. If there was an advantage to be gained from not being familiar with her work, it was in the fact that I felt no disconnect between this version of her and the version on billboards, banner ads and talk shows. To me, she was just someone who needed answers, just like all the other people I helped. But there was no denying that, in seeing how she’d looked at my phone, I was also reminded of the differences. It was the reason we weren’t meeting at her house and why I wasn’t edging past photographers camped at her gates, waiting and hoping for a glimpse of who she was dating: Ellie’s life was a constant leaked audio recording away from being front-page news.
Realizing I needed her to feel comfortable, I switched off my phone. ‘Why don’t you tell me about Preston Stewart?’
She’d called me the day before but hadn’t said a lot over the phone, presumably for all the same reasons she didn’t want to meet in public or have me turn up at her house. All she would say was that it involved a man she knew called Preston Stewart. When I’d googled Preston, I found out that he was a neurologist at a private hospital in Chelsea called ‘The Crest’, but apart from his professional credentials, he was basically a blank. According
to what I’d read in the media, Ellie was single, and had been for four years, and he wasn’t a relative of hers because that had been a dead end too.
When she didn’t reply, I gently prompted her again: ‘Ellie? Who’s Preston Stewart?’
In the front, I saw Matt turn slightly – his eyes going to the rear-view mirror – and a look passed between them. It was brief but it told me everything about the strength of their working relationship and how much she trusted him. It was also obvious from Matt’s expression that he didn’t much like the idea of outsourcing whatever this was to me; that he might rather have dealt with it himself. In turn, it also made me wonder if the media might have been searching in the wrong place when it came to who Ellie was close to, or even possibly dating. In the world in which she existed, trust didn’t come easily, so when you found it, you kept hold of it, were drawn to it, and the bond between driver and star was undeniable, even from this briefest of moments.
I made a mental note of it.
I thought maybe, later on, I might come back to it.
But a second later, everything changed.
. . . 47 hours to go . . .
‘Preston is my husband,’ Ellie said.
I stared at her. ‘You’re married?’
‘Coming up for six months now.’
Though Preston Stewart had been a dead end, I’d spent almost three hours the previous night reading absolutely everything I could find on Ellie, from interviews on YouTube to profiles in glossy magazines, all the way down the slippery slope to stories about her personal life on entertainment and gossip sites. Nowhere did I see anything that even remotely suggested she and Preston were connected, let alone that she was married to him.
‘How have you kept it out of the press?’
‘We got married in Gibraltar,’ she said. ‘We flew into Malaga and then drove across the border. The press didn’t know that was where we were going, and we didn’t have to inform notaries here when we got back, or tour lawyers’ offices to get everything signed off and made legal, because it’s obviously a British territory. I mean, I love what I do, I really do, and I know I’m lucky, but it can be exhausting. You’re sitting having lunch with a friend and suddenly you see someone giving you the side eye at another table, and your first thought is, “I wonder if they’re a journalist.” It wasn’t like that in Gibraltar. No one was looking for me, and the people who married us all agreed to sign NDAs.’
‘And the media still haven’t figured it out?’
‘No. We’ve been careful. I spend most of my time at his place in the Surrey Hills and only use my home in Holland Park when I’m shooting the show in Ealing. We’ve had to tell a few selected
people, and obviously our families know . . .’ Her face became greyer, her expression more sombre. ‘Basically, the one thing I’ve learned is that if you keep the circle tight then you know where the leak comes from.’
We were on the North Circular Road, passing Gunnersbury Cemetery. She swivelled and looked out of her window, the grave plots blinking in and out of view between the skeletal branches of trees stripped for winter.
‘I wasn’t sure exactly who to turn to for this.’ Her eyes flicked to Matt’s again in the rear-view mirror. I’d been wrong about them potentially being in a relationship, but I could see I was right about something else: he hadn’t wanted to involve me.
‘Is Preston missing?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What happened?’
‘He . . .’ She stopped. ‘He was in a car accident a fortnight ago. He’d, uh . . .’ She stopped again, this time for longer, but I could already see where this was going.
‘Was he drunk?’
She glanced at me. ‘Yes.’
‘How drunk?’
‘He’d had three pints of beer after work with a couple of colleagues – so, you know, he was over the limit, but he wasn’t drunk drunk.’ She held up a hand. ‘Not that I’m saying what he did was right. He should never have got behind the wheel and I told him as much.’ She ground to a halt again. ‘He hit a lamp post about a mile from his house. Luckily for him, it’s all countryside, so there were no witnesses.’
‘Was he okay?’
‘He was fine – mostly. He cracked an eye socket, bust his nose. Not serious, but serious enough that he needed some surgery. He decided to get it done at the private hospital that he’s a partner in –The Crest. It made the most sense. Quite a few of the doctors and nurses there know that we’re married, because they’ve been friends
with Preston for donkey’s years, and even if they don’t, because a lot of high-profile people get procedures done there – you know, celebrities, politicians, sports people – it’s extremely discreet. Preston calls it “the vacuum” because nothing ever gets out.’
‘When did he go in?’
‘Yesterday.’
I looked at her, surprised. I normally worked cold cases because the first port of call for families was always the police. But the disappearance of Preston Stewart was brand new – and that meant it was likely that Ellie had bypassed the cops entirely.
‘We got to the hospital at seven thirty a.m,’ she continued. ‘At about nine, Preston was taken down for his surgery, and I chatted to some of the staff there. The surgery took about an hour – so at ten, ten fifteen, Preston was taken to recovery. I went down to see him there, and he was still coming around from the anaesthetic, but his surgeon friend – the guy who did the op, Robert Lewellyn; he’s also Preston’s business partner at The Crest – told me it had all gone well and he’d be back to talk to us later.’
She glanced at me – quickly, uncertainly.
‘I went and got a tea and then one of the nurses came and found me and told me he’d been moved up to his private room. By that time, he’d been in there, alone, for about twenty minutes. I arrived with the nurse and she started taking his bandaging off so that she could apply some cream. Preston was still groggy, very tired, and the drugs were still in his system, so he was quiet the whole time.’
The Mercedes came to a halt at some lights.
‘The nurse,’ Ellie started, then stopped again. ‘The nurse was new, had never met Preston before – had no idea what he looked like. She just took the bandages off and said that all the swelling and bruising would calm down over the next few days. But I could see straight away. I sat there and I stared at him, and I told her.’
‘Told her?’ I frowned. ‘Told her what?’
‘“That’s not my husband.”’
. . . 47 hours to go . . .
I felt thrown, uncertain if I’d heard properly.
‘It was someone else under the bandages?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who?’
‘The guy who Robert Lewellyn had operated on before Preston. His name was Kevin Neale.’ The turmoil in her face was stark, even a day on. ‘I said to the nurse, “This isn’t my husband,” and she looked at me like I was having a breakdown. I told her, “That’s not my husband. That’s not Preston.” And then she scurried off to find Robert.’
‘What did Robert say?’
‘He walks in, takes one look at the patient – this Kevin guy – and says, “Oh, there must have been a mix-up.” I wasn’t particularly concerned at that stage, because I thought it would get sorted. I was angry more than anything. The Crest costs an absolute fortune, even with Preston’s employee discount, and when you’re paying that much, you don’t expect them to mix up their patients.’ Her voice hitched a fraction. ‘Robert started explaining to me that he’d done two operations back-to-back, and then apologized again and started laying into a couple of the staff who were nearby. I don’t know whose fault it was – I didn’t care – I just said, “Where’s Preston?”’
An ominous silence gathered like a storm cloud.
‘They couldn’t find him?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘My husband had vanished.’
‘He wasn’t anywhere in the hospital at all?’
‘No. I mean, it’s genuinely staggering. How the hell does a patient go missing like that? It’s not like Preston could have got up and walked out either – he had bandaging all over his face and he was still recovering from the anaesthetic. If he’d got up off the bed, he’d have been flat on the floor in two seconds. He should either have been in recovery, or right there in the room. Plus, there were members of staff around constantly, so how could no one have seen him? I just . . .’ She shook her head.
I got out my notebook and – shakily, trying to ride the car’s movements – wrote down the names she’d given me. ‘So this Kevin Neale guy was operated on first?’
‘Yes. He was already in theatre when we arrived at seven thirty.’
That meant, in turn, he would have been further along in his recovery than Preston. But Kevin Neale was still semi-conscious, so at that point Preston would have been even less capable of walking out of the hospital unaided.
‘Do you know the last time Preston was seen?’
‘All I know is what Robert told me. That Preston and Kevin were both in the same recovery room, next to one another, then they were moved to separate private rooms by the same porter.’
‘And what has the porter said?’
‘That he took Preston to his private room first, then Kevin.’
‘So he could have just muddled up the rooms?’
‘No. Kevin was in Preston’s room, so Preston should have been in Kevin’s if it had been a simple mix-up.’
‘And no one noticed that Kevin Neale’s room was empty?’
‘They did, but not until later. The nurse said she was only due to go to Kevin after she’d finished with Preston, so no one checked on Kevin’s room at first.’
‘And the porter definitely brought both men up from recovery?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he says he delivered them to their correct rooms?’
‘That’s what he says, yes.’
I tried to make sense of it all and worked through the timings.
There could have been a paperwork mix-up in recovery, whether deliberate or not, and that could have explained why the porter delivered the men to the wrong rooms. Or the porter could have been part of whatever this was and, despite his denials to the contrary, switched the men on purpose. Or some other member of staff was in on it – Robert Lewellyn, the nurse, someone else at The Crest. What seemed much more certain was that neither Preston nor Kevin Neale would have been in any state to walk out of the hospital on their own – and whatever happened to Preston happened inside the twenty minutes he was left on his own after being wheeled up from recovery to the wrong room. But what reason would there be for Preston to just vanish?
Or for someone else to vanish him?
‘You didn’t want to take this to the police?’ I asked her.
She shook her head immediately and, as she did, I saw Matt’s eyes shift to her in the mirror. This time, Ellie smiled weakly at her driver’s reflection and said, ‘Matt thinks I should. Robert said the hospital are obligated to report a missing patient too, even though I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to do that. He’s thinking of the reputational damage, I suppose. I asked him to give me forty-eight hours, which he eventually agreed to – and that’s where you come in. I don’t trust the police.’
‘Why not?’
‘A few years back, my sister got arrested for dealing. You might have seen it in the press.’ I nodded, remembering a story I’d read the night before. ‘She made some stupid decisions, got in with all the wrong people. The Met leaked her story to the tabloids.’
‘You know that for sure?’
‘I know that’s what happened, believe me. And if they did that, I guarantee you they’ll do the same with this . . .’ Anger, frustration.
‘I totally understand that,’ I said. ‘All I’m saying is this is an active case – it’s fresh – and generally when families come to me, the missing person has been gone for months, maybe years,
and the police have essentially given up on finding them. I don’t work many searches like this.’
‘I get it,’ she said, but there was something in her face this time, a shadow that formed. She held my gaze for a moment. ‘There’s another, uh . . .’ She paused, glanced at Matt. ‘There’s another reason I don’t want to go to the cops.’
‘Okay.’
But now the car was silent.
Ellie went to speak and then stopped again, the words mired in her mouth.
‘It’s all right,’ I said.
‘Preston studied Medicine at Bristol,’ she continued, then faded. It looked like she was steeling herself. ‘Something happened while he was at university . . .’
I saw Matt glance our way again.
‘He only told me about it for the first time a couple of months ago. He’d never ever mentioned it before then. But one night he got home from work, we opened a bottle of wine – one became two – and we ended up getting pretty pissed. Anyway, I was dozing off on the sofa when I started to become aware of him talking. Whispering would probably be more accurate. I opened my eyes a little – and he was looking at me, right at me, and he was talking to me, telling me this whole story.’
‘What did he tell you?’
‘It was about something he and a friend at university got up to. He didn’t tell me who the friend was – at least, not that I remember – but I can’t stop picturing the way Preston looked at me. Like, right at me. It was so intense. It was as if this was something he’d been needing to say for a long time, to get off his chest – a secret he couldn’t keep any more.’
‘Like a confession?’
‘Exactly. But when I asked him about it the next morning, he laughed it all off and said he was drunk and didn’t know what he’d been going on about.’
‘You think that was a lie?’
‘Maybe.’ She blinked. ‘I don’t want to go to the police, because I don’t want this all over the tabloids before I’ve even had a chance to figure it out myself . . .’ A pause. ‘But I’m beginning to wonder if what he told me is connected to him going missing.’
‘Why would you think that?’
‘Because he told me he killed someone.’
. . . 47 hours to go . . .
‘He killed someone? You’re sure that’s what you heard?’
‘Positive.’
‘You said you were drunk . . .’
‘I didn’t mishear.’ She dabbed a tissue to her eye. ‘He said he and this uni friend killed someone in their first year in Bristol.’
‘But he didn’t say who the friend was or what happened?’
‘No.’
‘Did he say where this murder took place?’
‘No.’ Ellie shook her head. ‘No, nothing like that.’
No wonder she didn’t want to go to the police. If she believed that someone in the Met had leaked the story to the press about her sister’s drug charge, how could she trust anyone with the story of her husband going missing? Ellie had done nothing wrong, but she was perpetually in the media’s sight lines. That meant her husband’s disappearance could lead investigators to his drunken confession – and then any crimes Preston had committed would become hers by osmosis.
‘Have you got Preston’s phone?’
‘Yes.’
‘His wallet? His bank cards?’
‘Yes, I have those too,’ Ellie said. ‘He left all of them with me before he headed down to surgery. And his laptop, if you need that, is at his house.’
I took a moment, thinking about the disappearance. He hadn’t taken any tech with him, and the means to access his bank accounts were still with his wife. Did that point towards
whatever happened at the hospital coming completely out of the blue? And did that make it more or less likely that it might be connected to what he’d told Ellie about killing someone? The quickest way to get to the truth about what happened at The Crest was going to be through their CCTV and by interviewing the staff there. How I proved the veracity of Preston’s confession was less clear.
‘Okay, let’s work through this chronologically,’ I said softly and showed her my phone again, telling her that I needed to record what was coming next. She relented. We were past the point at which she needed to worry about being on tape – she’d just revealed that her husband was a drink-driver who may have murdered someone.
‘So the confession was when?’
‘Around the middle of November.’
Eight weeks ago.
‘And, as best as you can remember, what exactly did Preston say to you?’
A painful twist to her face as she went back. ‘It was like I told you. He said he did something terrible at university, and that he and this friend killed someone. I took it to mean another student.’
‘And, the next day, when he put it down to the drink, you believed him?’
‘I mean, it still seemed a weird thing to say, but yes, I did. We’d been married for four months at that point, we’d been seeing each other for a year before that – I’d never had any reason to suspect him of not being totally honest with me. In fact, the opposite, really. Preston tended to overshare. After about two weeks of us first getting together, I knew his whole life story. That was part of what drew me to him. I loved how good and kind-hearted he was, but I really liked how open he was with me, how easy it was to know him. He was atypical like that. Most men I’d been with, most men my friends have been with – in fact, no offence, most men in general –you have to pin down and torture before they start opening up.’
‘Had he talked to you about his university friends before?’
‘Yes. He talked about them a lot. I’ve never met any of them, though.’
‘Why not?’
‘I knew, sooner or later, we were going to have to go public, but I just enjoyed the relative peace that came with not many people knowing about our marriage, even about the fact that we were together at all. I had no real idea who these friends were or if I could trust them. But I promised him that, eventually, we would tell them.’ She went to her pocket, took out an iPhone and handed it to me. ‘That’s his phone. All of his friends’ names and contact details are on there. I’ve been through the texts and emails – every single one of them – looking for some sort of explanation . . .’ She grimaced. I asked her for the passcode and had a quick look through. There must have been a hundred names in the address book.
‘So then he hit that lamp post?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Which was a couple of weeks ago?’
‘Yes.’
‘And who went and picked him up?’
‘Matt. He towed the car back.’
‘And between the confession and yesterday at the hospital, you two have never discussed again what he talked about that night?’
‘No.’ She rubbed at her brow with a painted nail. ‘I hadn’t forgotten it exactly, but I’d kind of locked it away. Sometimes I would think about it in quiet moments. I would think, “That was a crazy thing to admit to, even drunk.” But there’s honestly been nothing different about him in the time since, so I guess I never felt compelled to ask him about it. But now . . .’ Her voice was getting quieter. ‘All I know is that what happened yesterday makes no sense to me unless . . .’ Her eyes started to fill up.
Unless he wasn’t the man she believed him to be.
Unless he really had done something terrible.
Unless Preston Stewart was a killer.
. . . 46 hours to go . . .
We went back over everything we’d talked about, and then, before long, I saw that we were approaching a private airfield. We were somewhere in Hertfordshire, but I’d lost track of what direction we’d gone in because I’d been concentrating on what Ellie was telling me. As soon as she saw me looking, she said, ‘Us talking in the back of the car like this – it’s not just because I want to try and keep it out of the press if I can. I also have to fly to Amsterdam and then down to Berlin to do some press for the show. I’ll be back around nine tonight.’
After passing through security, we followed a road running parallel to the edge of the airfield, down towards a hangar. I could see some of the members of the Church Row Manor cast milling around, including Ellie’s on-screen lover, as well as a clutch of others on their phones, instantly recognizable as publicists.
‘You can call me any time on my mobile,’ Ellie said. ‘But in the meantime, Matt can drive you where you need to go.’
I saw Matt glance at me again, his face neutral.
Having him drive me back to London wasn’t just a practical necessity given the lack of a train station or taxi rank nearby, it also gave me a chance to ask him some questions on the return leg. Ellie had explained that he worked directly for her and Preston and had been hired by Preston after a press photographer had aggressively pursued Ellie’s car when she was on her way back from the set the previous September. Matt was an ex-soldier.
‘Have you told anyone at The Crest that you’ve come to me?’ I asked her.
‘No. But I can call them if that would help?’
‘No, don’t do that yet. I’ll let you know when to contact them.’
I didn’t know what was going on at the hospital, but the most effective way to find out was if they didn’t know I was coming. Someone in there knew something, because patients in Preston’s condition didn’t just wander off by themselves, and it would be easier to find the fox in the henhouse if that person had no prep time.
We pulled up outside the hangar.
Matt got out and went to Ellie’s door.
But as it opened, she turned back to me and I could see the conflict in her eyes, the expression I’d seen so often in the faces of the families and partners left behind: she didn’t know if she’d done the right thing in sharing all of this with a stranger, a feeling exacerbated by her job and the unique pressures that came with it. Deeper down, there was something even worse: the fear that her husband’s whispered confession might actually turn out to be true.
‘Do you think less of me for not going to the police?’ she asked.
I looked at Matt. His expression didn’t alter an inch, except when – just for a split second – his eyes flicked to me and away again. He obviously wanted to know the answer to the question himself.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘it’s twenty-four hours since your husband disappeared, which means I have the sort of head start that I don’t normally get given when I’m trying to locate missing people. We have to make full use of that. After this is over, after I’ve found him, then you’ll have plenty of time to think about what you’re going to do and who you’re going to tell what. When that moment comes, my opinion on what you’ve done will remain as irrelevant as it is now. I don’t think less of you, Ellie, because we all try to make the best choices we can in the pressure of the moment.’
A smile crept in from the corner of her mouth.
‘The second thing you should know is that the police absolutely hate me, so the fact that you’re not telling them for the time being – it’s not going to keep me awake at night.’
‘Why do they hate you?’
‘Because I solve missing persons cases they’ve failed to.’
‘So they’re jealous of you?’
‘It’s a little more complex than that, and none of that history is relevant to me finding out where Preston went. But what I will say is that, much as I don’t like to involve the police – and as much as you don’t want to either – at some stage we will probably have to. And even if we don’t make that call, as he’s already told you, your friend Robert Lewellyn at the hospital will.’
I glanced at Matt.
Maybe a tiny glimmer of approval now.
‘Speaking of which,’ I said. ‘I need to move fast on this, which means being in multiple places at the same time would be very helpful. With that in mind, would you object if I brought someone else in to help me? He’s a former detective . . .’
Healy
Yesterday
Healy took a long drag on his cigarette.
He was standing at the bottom of his son’s driveway, the front garden – really just a mess of broken concrete and old weeds – behind him, a railway embankment across the street, half hidden by an unattractive steel fence. Every few minutes a train thundered past – a sliver of its roof visible, the noise so loud it was a surprise Alice and Liam ever slept at night – and Healy would wonder if this was really the best they could have done. But they’d worked hard on the inside, concentrating most of their attention there, and because the interior was nice and the back garden had a neat patio, a lawn, and was entirely surrounded by six-foot fencing, sometimes it was possible to believe you weren’t in a drab, untidy street in Wembley.
‘Ah, there you are.’
Healy turned, following the sound of the voice, and saw his ex-wife, Gemma, emerging from a gate at the side of the house. Like Healy, she was in her late fifties, but unlike Healy she looked pretty good on it: the dark hair that she’d always worn long during their marriage was now chopped into a shorter style that suited her; her green eyes were as bright as the day the two of them had met back in Dublin over thirty years ago. And when she was pissed off with him – which she clearly was now – they’d lost none of their ability to tell him exactly how much.
‘You’re back on those again, then?’ she said, glancing at the cigarette.
The disappointment was heavy in her voice. It took him back to
when that was part of their daily routine. At the time, he thought he’d been doing a pretty good job of balancing a career working for the Met and bringing up three kids, but when he and Gemma separated, when their daughter, Leanne, died, when Healy got sacked from the police and his life completely spiralled, he had a lot of time to reassess. The truth was, he’d been a neglectful husband, a mostly absent father and a borderline drunk, and when his daughter had died, he’d got angry and vengeful too, and both of those things had only magnified his flaws. In the end, it had cost him his marriage, his relationship with his two sons, his career and almost his life.
A decade and a half on, he liked to think he was different, and maybe he actually was, but much as he was able to put on a good show for Gemma and was rebuilding a bond with his boys, he knew a part of that anger and vengeance remained. He could feel it like a fire, deep in the pit of his stomach, and knew exactly why it still burned: the man who’d murdered Leanne, who’d murdered eight other women, was still alive. Healy’s daughter was in a grave and never coming home, but her killer got a prison cell. He wouldn’t ever get released, but that didn’t make it right.
Because where he deserves to be is deep in the fucking ground.
‘Colm?’
He realized he’d drifted, had tuned Gemma out, and so he looked down at the smoking cigarette between his fingers and said, ‘You know me. I aim to disappoint.’
‘Here comes the self-pity.’
Healy felt a throb in his throat but pushed down a response. Fifteen years ago, in the dying embers of their marriage, he would never have been able to let that pass.
‘Your son and daughter-in-law are wondering where you are.’
He took a drag and held up the cigarette. ‘Well, now you know,’ he said, smoke gathering in front of his face. ‘Is the little lady enjoying bath-time?’
‘Why don’t you come and see for yourself?’
‘I thought I’d give them some space.’
‘Liam and Alice get to spend every day with her, Colm. They get to bath her every day. The whole reason they invited you around this afternoon was so that you could spend time cuddling your granddaughter and you could play with her in the bath. Instead, you’re out here letting that head of yours mess things up.’
He looked at her. ‘What does that mean?’
‘You know exactly what it means.’
‘Gem, if I was the greatest grandfather in the world, you’d still –’
‘No,’ she said sharply, cutting him off. ‘This is nothing to do with me. What’s going on here’ – she looked at him, at his cigarette, at him standing outside while everyone else was in the house – ‘this is all you.’ She let that settle, her eyes doing the hard work again. ‘That baby in there is your granddaughter. She’s completely innocent in this. She’s not even eighteen months old yet – she knows about ten words, she’s only just learned to walk, she can’t do anything besides toddle around and feel the love of her family. So I don’t care how you do it, but you’re going to pull yourself together, and you’re going to get inside, and you’re going to bath your granddaughter, and you’re going to love her. And when you talk to Alice, you’re going to stop being an arsehole.’
‘I haven’t been an arsehole to Alice.’
‘It’s in what you don’t say, Colm. I spot you looking at her sometimes and you may as well be telling her to her face that you can’t stand her.’
He didn’t say anything.
Gemma took a step closer. ‘Look at me.’
He tapped some ash from his cigarette, then turned – slowly, reluctantly.
‘Alice’s father isn’t who Alice is,’ Gemma said, and Healy was instantly back in David Raker’s kitchen weeks before Alice was due to give birth. That was when she’d told Healy and Raker the truth about who she was. She’d told them about how she’d grown
up in care since the age of two. She told them how her father had murdered her mother. She told them how she’d just wanted to seek the Healy family out, talk to them, find out about Leanne –just try to get answers and some measure of closure – but had quickly, unexpectedly fallen in love with Liam. And then she’d told them the part that had joined everything together.
She’d told Healy and Raker who her father was.
His name was Glass.
And he hadn’t just killed her mother, he’d killed six other women and hidden them in a disused sewer network, disposed of a seventh in a nearby wall cavity, and killed his wife and unborn baby. Nine women, ten victims – and one of them had been Healy’s daughter.
‘She’s a lovely kid, Colm.’ Gemma was still talking. ‘She loves Liam, and Liam adores her. They have a baby, they have a house. They’re happy. Alice doesn’t know her father, doesn’t want to know him, isn’t anything like him. Please don’t punish her for where she came from. Alice isn’t the one that took Leanne from us.’
Healy tapped off some more ash. ‘Why’d they have to call her Leanne?’
‘What?’
‘Why did they have to call the baby Leanne?’
‘Are you joking? Why do you think they called her Leanne?’ Her blood was up now. ‘It was a lovely thing to do. Don’t go and turn it into something negative.’
Those green eyes again, making him feel small.
‘No, you’re right,’ he said, convincingly enough that she seemed to buy the lie. ‘I’m sorry. My head’s all over the place.’ But it was all just a fabrication: he hated that they’d called the baby Leanne. Every time Healy heard his daughter’s name, it chipped another piece of him away, and he was back in that moment fourteen years ago when he and Raker had discovered Glass’s hideout in a forest nicknamed the Dead Tracks.
He saw the room in which they’d found Leanne.
He saw the stillness in her face.
He was trapped once again in the worst moment of his life.
‘Are you coming, then?’ Gemma asked.
Healy took one last drag of the cigarette and then flicked it out into the road. As it died against the grey tarmac, he followed Gemma around to the back garden, and then in through the kitchen door. Straight away, he could hear the sound of laughter – splashing, baby talk – coming from upstairs.
Gemma stopped at the bottom of the stairs, gave Healy a look that said, You’re going to go up there and you’re going to be the dad and grandad those two deserve, and then she went into the living room. Healy slowly made his way upstairs.
‘There’s our beautiful girl,’ he said as he entered the bathroom, looking at Leanne, giving her a wave, her red cheeks covered in foam from the bubble bath. Liam immediately made way and Healy dropped to his knees next to Alice, giving her a smile. ‘How can Gramps help out?’ he asked.
Alice broke into a big smile of her own.
It was warm, totally genuine.
And as he looked at her, despite himself, Healy knew Gemma was right: all Alice really wanted was to be accepted by them. She just wanted to be Alice-Leigh Reddy.
Not the daughter of a serial killer.
And as he played with his granddaughter in the bath, as he made her giggle, as the sound filled his heart and transported him back thirty years to another time and another place when a different little girl – also called Leanne – was in a different bath in another house, he allowed his guard to drop. He let himself think this was normal.
Everything will be fine.
You can relax.
You can just be.
And then it all fell apart again.
Because, an hour later, he found out Alice was lying to them.
. . . 46 hours to go . . .
I watched Matt walk Ellie across the tarmac to the plane and texted Healy. I hadn’t spoken to him for a week, and a message I’d sent him a few days before, checking in to see how he was, hadn’t even been read. I told him to call me.
A few minutes later, I’d switched to the front seat and Matt was nosing the Mercedes back through the gates of the airfield. As he did, I checked my notes, letting the discomfort of a silence settle between us. It was an old police tactic – one they’d used countless times on me – and one that I imagined Matt, given his history in the military, was probably familiar with. That didn’t make it any less pleasant to deal with, though, and after a while I saw him start glancing across at my notebook.
‘Do you mind if I record this?’ I asked, but didn’t really give him a chance to respond – I was already setting up my phone. ‘Can I ask your full name?’
‘Matthew Higgs.’
‘And you’ve been working for Ellie since when?’
‘Last October.’
‘And you were a soldier before that.’
‘I haven’t been a soldier for ten years.’
‘Which regiment were you in?’
‘Does it make a difference?’
‘I’m just interested.’
He stared at me. ‘Grenadier Guards.’
I wasn’t really a military expert, but I knew the Grenadier Guards were one of the oldest regiments in the British Army and
its most senior infantry unit. Matt must have been in his early fifties, so he’d probably been on the front line in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I decided not to press him on it for now, though –he clearly didn’t want to talk about the army and I didn’t need him closing up on me.
‘How did Preston come to hire you?’ I asked.
‘I had a protection job before this, with a patient of his.’ He glanced at me and could see I was about to ask who. ‘Guy called Clark Sanders. He made all his money in hotels. He got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about two years back and the worse he got, the more his family worried about people taking advantage of him – shoving a form in his hand and telling him he needed to sign it, that sort of thing. So they asked me if I could be around to keep an eye on everything. I mean, at the end, you could have got him to do anything.’ A flicker of something different in his face – sadness, sympathy. Those were good things to see. He’d come to care about Sanders. It seemed obvious that he’d come to care about Ellie too.
‘What do you think happened at the hospital?’
He frowned. ‘Isn’t that what Ellie hired you for?’
‘You don’t have a theory?’
He sighed, like it was all some huge imposition, but I could see his brain ticking over. ‘You don’t have to be a doctor to know he didn’t walk out of that hospital pumped full of anaesthetic. Other than that, I don’t know.’ He switched on the windscreen wipers. ‘No offence, but I told her to go to the cops because they’re best placed to find out where Preston went. They’ve got manpower. They’ve got the resources. You’re just you. I did some reading up last night and some of what you’ve done, it’s impressive, don’t get me wrong, but this thing is live. It’s happening right now. It’s not some dead-in-the-water case.’
‘You don’t think I can handle it?’
‘On your own? No.’
‘I’ve asked a friend to help me.’
‘This Healy guy?’ Matt smirked. ‘Yeah, I saw him mentioned in the articles I read last night. He sounds like a mess.’
He wasn’t a million miles away from the truth – or, at least, the truth about a version of Healy I’d met for the first time fourteen years ago – but the Colm Healy of today was different. Or, rather, different enough. I didn’t want to get bogged down in history, or why there would always be a small part of me that was waiting for Healy to blow up his life. I preferred to focus on something else.
Healy was a brilliant detective.
‘What’s Preston like?’
For a moment, Matt seemed thrown by the change of direction. But then he recovered his composure. ‘He’s a nice bloke.’
‘A good employer?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m guessing you spent more time with Ellie than with him?’
He eyed me, like I was implying something. I held up a hand, assuring him I wasn’t – although a part of me wondered how far off the mark the idea might actually be. I hadn’t once got the impression that Ellie was anything less than totally committed to her marriage, but it was harder to say where Matt’s feelings lay.
‘I spent time with both of them,’ he said.
‘And Preston never mentioned this university friend to you?’ ‘No.’
‘Never hinted something may have happened down in Bristol?’ ‘No.’
‘When did Ellie tell you about what she heard Preston confess to?’
‘Last night was the first time I’d heard about it.’
‘And you helped clean up the scene after Preston hit that lamp post?’
‘I did.’
‘Has the car been repaired now?’
‘Yes. He got it back at the end of last week.’
‘Any fallout from that? Anyone come asking questions?’