The First Disappearance
part one
Rebekah’s hotel was two minutes’ walk from Embankment station, so I got a District Line train in from Kew and spent the half-hour journey going over notes I’d made after our last call. In truth, there wasn’t much to read back: she recalled so little about the person that she’d asked me to find, and it had been so long since they’d disappeared.
Normally, families knew the missing person intimately.
But not this time.
Here, I was already chasing a shadow.
It was cold inside the carriage, colder in the station, and pretty much sub-zero at street level, the wind absolutely biting even under the roof of Embankment Place. I pulled up the collar of my coat and tightened my scarf as I crossed Northumberland Avenue but neither made any real di erence: a week into December, winter was fully embedded, frost on the rooftops, tarmac glassed with ice, and it was the kind of cold that cut deep as a knife. As I approached the hotel, I briefly wondered how Rebekah was coping with this weather – and then, almost as quickly, realized she’d be coping just fine. She’d come from a place every bit as cold as this and had dealt with the kind of trauma most people would go their whole life without experiencing. Rebekah Murphy wasn’t going to be fazed by a little cold.
A wall of warm air hit me as I entered the hotel foyer, lights blinking in an elaborate Christmas tree o to my right. A fire had been lit, flames dancing in the neck of the chimney. We’d agreed 10 a.m. but I was a little early, so I found a chair as close to the fire as I could get and spent a while going through calls, texts and emails.
A few minutes later, Rebekah emerged from the elevators.
‘David,’ she said, as she approached.
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She was in her early forties, dark-haired, green-eyed, her right temple marked by a scar that I knew – from what she’d told me already – was a remnant from an assault on her the previous year. I stood, shaking her hand. She had a quiet, unassuming confidence, a calmness I’d already noted on our videocalls. All of it, I imagined, had been cultivated in the emergency rooms and operating theatres of the hospitals she worked in back in New York, where she was an orthopaedic surgeon.
There was a man in his seventies standing behind her.
‘This is Frank,’ Rebekah said.
I shook hands with him too and wondered who he was. She hadn’t mentioned that she was going to be bringing anyone else – she’d left her two girls back in the US with her ex-husband – and I knew her father had died a few years ago. But whoever Frank was, he knew me because he smiled and said, ‘Pleasure. Big fan of your work.’
He had a New York accent, unlike Rebekah: despite living in the US since she was eighteen, she still spoke like a Brit, even if some of her words and phrasing had become heavily Americanized. As if sensing my confusion, she said, ‘I didn’t mean to throw you. Frank coming with me was kind of a last-minute decision.’
And then it clicked: this must be Frank Travis.
I’d read about him in the stories that had helped fill in background on Rebekah. After the assault on her the previous year, Travis had been the NYPD cop that had worked her case. Even without her having to say anything else, I could see the tight bond they’d forged in the time since.
‘Frank used to be a cop,’ she confirmed. ‘This is, uh . . . This is a big step for me, flying all the way out here. I just needed some moral support.’
I nodded. ‘I understand.’
And I genuinely did: I totally got her desire to have him here – someone she trusted, who made her feel safe – because she didn’t really know me at all and what she was asking me to do – the digging into her life, the questions I’d have to ask about the people that circled it – was something pretty far from safe. I’d met her in New
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York earlier in the year while I was there on holiday, a chance meeting in Bryant Park, and we’d got talking, and I’d ended up telling her what I did – and then she’d asked me for a card. But it had taken her two months to even phone me.
Another five to pluck up the courage to get on a plane.
‘I just want answers,’ she said, even as the doubt lingered in her voice. She glanced at Travis and, again, I glimpsed the connection they had: familial, gentle, protective. ‘I just need to know why my mother disappeared. I need to know why I didn’t hear a thing from her for almost forty years.’
The three of us looked at each other.
‘And I need to know why she suddenly started writing to me.’
We headed across Jubilee Bridge to a café tucked away in a narrow residential street north of Waterloo and found a table in the corner. While we waited to order, we talked about Rebekah’s girls, her life in New York, and then her life before that, here in England, where she’d gone to school. Eventually, she got out a picture of her mother and handed it to me. It was the physical version of a photograph that she’d messaged to me a few days earlier: her mother was sitting on the front step of Rebekah’s childhood home in Cambridge. She’d been pretty: fair-skinned, brown-eyed, her auburn hair a series of tight curls. ‘I didn’t know if you’d need the original,’ Rebekah said softly, her tone neutral.
I thanked her and then got out my notebook and a pen and started going back over some of the more peripheral stu we’d already covered in our videocalls. Mostly, it was so that I had everything clear in my head but also so that I could hear Rebekah talking, reacting, the fractional movements in her face. I’d been able to see and hear her on Zoom calls, but it was never the same as sitting across a table from someone.
‘Just to confirm a few details,’ I said. ‘Your mum’s name was Fiona?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fiona Murphy – or did she keep her maiden name?’
‘She was Murphy, but her maiden name was Camberwell.’
‘She was thirty when she disappeared, so she’d be around sixtyseven now?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘That means she was born in 1955.’ I checked it all o against the information that Rebekah had previously given me. ‘It might help narrow a background search if you knew what month she was born in?’
‘I think it was March.’
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‘But you’re not certain?’
‘I’m sure Dad said it was March, but . . .’
She faded out. I can’t be sure.
‘Your dad’s name was Henry, correct?’
‘Yes.’
I underlined his name. ‘And your mum vanished when you were three?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember anything at all of that day?’
‘Virtually nothing,’ she replied, a pained expression on her face. ‘Most of what I remember is based on what my dad told me: Boxing Day morning 1985, he was in the kitchen preparing lunch and me and my brothers were upstairs playing with our Christmas presents. Next thing we know, she’s gone. Dad didn’t hear her leave; didn’t hear the door open. Nothing. He went into the station that night and filed a missing person’s report. Not that it got us anywhere.’
‘She was never found?’
‘No.’
‘And she never got in touch?’
‘It depends what you mean by “got in touch”.’
‘You’re talking about the cards she sent you?’
‘Yes,’ Rebekah said. ‘Condolence cards. My youngest brother, Mike, was killed in a car accident four years ago. A year after that, my dad died. He had cancer. He’d been battling it on and o for years. And my older brother Johnny . . . he’s gone too.’ A flicker in her face. This one seemed to hurt her most; she’d obviously been close to Johnny. ‘Every time, she sent a card.’
‘Did you bring the cards with you?’
She reached into her pocket, taking out three envelopes. I slid the cards out of the envelopes: they were condolence cards, all very similar designs – intertwined roses, their wriggling stems creating the word Sorry – and inside they were all plain. Nothing printed. Handwritten in each was basically the same message: in Mike’s, sent four years ago, and addressed to Rebekah’s father: I was sorry to hear about Mike ; in Henry’s, mailed thirteen months later, and addressed
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to both Rebekah and Johnny: I was sorry to hear about your dad ; and in Johnny’s, posted eight months ago, at the end of April, and addressed to Rebekah alone: I was sorry to hear the news about John. It was definitely the same person who wrote all three: every a had the same distinctive tail on it; the h and e in hear were very close together and the h looked more like an l if you glanced at it quickly.
I looked up and saw Rebekah staring at the cards, eyes shimmering, like a ripple on a pond. ‘That’s it. These are the only times I’ve heard from her in thirty-seven years.’
I looked at the envelopes, the airmail stamps on them. They’d definitely been sent from the UK . That suggested Fiona was alive and living here as recently as April. But it was going to be impossible to find out from where in the country she’d posted them: the envelope didn’t have any sort of postmark, let alone a location of a sorting o ce.
There was nothing on the cards themselves to help me either. Usually on the back of greeting cards there would be small print: information about the company that had made them, or a copyright message. But it was just blank. That meant they were untraceable, which could have been unintentional.
Or very deliberate.
‘What did you think when Mike’s card first turned up?’
Rebekah frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, Mike was – what? – eighteen months old when your mum walked out on you all? You don’t hear anything from her for thirty-four years and then suddenly she sends her condolences when he dies.’ I looked at Mike’s card. ‘You, your dad, Johnny – you must all have been shocked when it arrived?’
‘We were totally floored.’
‘Had you assumed she was dead?’
‘I don’t know what I thought exactly. I mean, it was obviously something the four of us talked about a lot, all the way back to when we were kids. Where did she go? Where was she now? Did she have a new family? All the questions you can imagine, we asked them all. But wherever she was – dead or alive – the biggest part for us was why she left in the first place.’
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‘What did your dad say she was like before she disappeared?’
‘He said she was fine.’ She paused, mouth flattening. ‘I mean, I’m separated – about to be divorced – so I’ve seen it from the inside. In every marriage, there are things that don’t work as they should. You have arguments, and you have things that annoy you, and maybe you even begin to realize that this person you’ve committed your life to isn’t the right one for you. It happens. So Dad admitted they had things like that – but, basically, they were fine. Even if they weren’t, though, she had three kids. Johnny was five, I was three, Mike was still in nappies. Why leave us ?’
She stopped for a second time, glancing at Travis. He smiled at her, winked: You’re doing fine, he was saying to her.
Rebekah faced me again: ‘I’ve got this hollow inside of me. It’s been there ever since I was old enough to process – properly – that she was gone and she wasn’t coming back. It shouldn’t matter after almost forty years, especially now that I have my own kids, these two beautiful girls that I love with every fibre of my being – but it does. It still matters. In fact, as time goes on, I’m starting to think it matters even more now that I have the girls because I can’t ever imagine leaving them like my mother left me.’
A few moments later, Rebekah excused herself and weaved her way across the café to the bathroom. As Travis watched her go, he said, ‘It’s been tough on her.’
‘Yeah, I can see that.’
‘Not just the stu with her mom. Everything. It’s why it’s taken her so long to fly out here. It’s not that she’s been uncertain about wanting to find out what went on with Fiona; she’s just uncertain about whether she can take any more heartache.’
‘I get it.’
Travis nodded. ‘I expect you do.’ He eyed me and the subtext was obvious: he’d read up about me, he’d done a background for Rebekah, perhaps to reassure her, and in that research he’d found all the heartache written into my cases – and into my life.
After Rebekah returned, I looped the conversation back around again: ‘How come you’ve never tried looking for your mum before?’
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‘I don’t know,’ Rebekah responded, and then ground to a halt. ‘Maybe, for a time, I didn’t want to know, just in case knowing was worse than being completely in the dark. But I didn’t have a clue where to start. That was probably the biggest thing. I lived in New York, those cards were coming from England; I had a job, kids, a marriage that was failing. I didn’t have the headspace.’ She stopped, toying with the last of her food. ‘Actually, that’s not true. I always had the headspace. She was always there, somewhere. I’ve been angry with her since I was a kid, but as I got older, the anger became easier to control, and I could force myself not to think about her. If I was feeling really low, I’d convince myself that she died shortly after she left, and that explained it all: the total lack of contact, the total indi erence she showed to walking out on me and my brothers. So when that card for Mike arrived, it screwed everything up again because the anger came back. I’d finally reached a point where I could go a day without thinking about how betrayed she made me feel. Then, suddenly, boom, the first card arrives and she’s back in my head.’
‘You said you never tried to look for her yourself, but did your dad ever try?’ I checked my notes from our previous conversations. ‘He worked as a cop, didn’t he?’
‘Yeah, after he left the military. I think he tried for a while. Like I say, he went into the station and reported her missing. And when that went nowhere, he said he tried looking for her himself.’
‘But he didn’t get anywhere?’
She shook her head. In truth, there was no way to be sure how hard Henry Murphy had looked, if he’d looked at all, just as there was no way of telling if he’d heard from Fiona before the condolence card for Mike turned up thirty-four years after she left them. Similarly, there was no way to know if Henry kept details back from the kids about the reasons why Fiona had walked out of the door in the first place. Whatever knowledge Henry Murphy may or may not have been carrying with him was now buried six feet under the earth in a cemetery three and a half thousand miles away.
‘You said you were born in Cambridge?’
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‘Yes. Me and both my brothers.’
‘Your dad was stationed with the US Air Force there?’
‘Right. Well, RAF Lakenheath.’
‘Was Fiona from Cambridge too?’
‘Dad said Peterborough originally and then she moved to Cambridge.’
This had been a reccurring theme as I’d got to know Rebekah over Zoom: her memories of her mother were almost entirely built on what her father had told her.
We talked for a while longer but, eventually, I felt we’d gone as far as we could. We discussed next steps, but in truth I didn’t have much of an idea myself: this was so di erent to the kind of missing persons’ cases I normally took on. With those, the missing person had usually been gone months, sometimes years, but they’d left behind some trace of themselves: a life, however small, I could get inside.
Fiona had nothing.
I had nothing.
She really was a shadow.
And yet I’d wanted to take the case after the very first Zoom call I’d had with Rebekah because there were things that had immediately snared me. The question of why Fiona walked out on her young family and never returned was one, perhaps the most obvious thing to explore. Yet it was the condolence cards that bothered me most. The huge, thirty-four-year time gap between her leaving and Mike’s card arriving was bizarre, an incongruous detail I couldn’t let go of and couldn’t stop thinking about. Three and a half decades of total silence, with absolutely no clue about where she was, and then, all of a sudden, the family were hearing from her. The fact that Rebekah had then received similar cards for both her father and older brother meant, at the very least, that – wherever she was – Fiona was keeping a peripheral eye on the Murphys.
So why not get in touch with them properly?
Why not pick up the phone or write an email?
I didn’t know for certain yet, didn’t know if maybe she had and Henry had just never told Rebekah. But if I was to assume Henry
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was as confused and surprised as Rebekah at the sudden correspondence, then I had to zero in on what Fiona’s motivation was.
Except Fiona was just a series of questions.
And there was one I couldn’t stop asking myself.
How did we even know it was her who sent the cards?
A snarl of wind stirred me from my thoughts as I entered Victoria Embankment Gardens. Just behind me was Scotland Yard, the famous sign out front in the middle of yet another revolution. I could see Ewan Tasker almost straightaway: he was dressed in a black, knee-length coat and red scarf, but it was his silver-grey hair that stood out. He was sitting on a bench, head down, fingers working a mobile phone.
‘You busy Snapchatting?’ I said as I got to him.
‘TikTok. Get with the times, Raker.’
We both smiled, shook hands, and embraced. It was a couple of months since I’d seen Task but he looked exactly the same. He was nearing his mid-seventies but you never would have guessed. He was tall and broad, strong and fit – except for a dodgy right knee. I suspected most of it came from the fact that he was still working part-time as a consultant at the Met. The work kept him focused, his brain sharp.
‘How you doing?’ he asked me.
‘Yeah, pretty good, old man.’ I looked around the park and drew my coat even tighter to my body. ‘Have you got time to go somewhere a bit warmer?’
‘I’d love to, but this is the only fifteen minutes I’ve got all day.’
‘In that case, I appreciate you coming out like this.’
‘Your sunny disposition makes it all worth it.’ He smiled at me again and then reached into his pocket. ‘As always, you didn’t get this from me.’ Pinched between his thumb and forefinger was a small, plain USB stick. ‘Everything should be on there.’
I took the flash drive from him.
‘It’s pretty thin,’ he said. ‘Fiona Murphy – née Camberwell – basically ceased to exist in 1985. I can’t find any trace of her anywhere
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else, in any of the systems we use. Her driving licence ran out in 1988 and was never renewed. Her passport ran out in 1990, same story. The only reason she’s still on the system is because her husband filed a missing person’s report the evening of her disappearance.’
‘Is there any chatter in the report about Henry?’
‘You mean was he ever a suspect?’
‘Husbands are usually the first port of call in something like this.’
Tasker shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. I mean, they looked at him, but from what I skim-read, they considered him a straight arrow; a good cop, a solid family man.’
‘And Fiona? Any evidence she changed her name?’
‘No,’ Task said. ‘Well, not o cially.’
Her driving licence and passport had been allowed to lapse, so she could have started using a di erent name, literally as soon as she walked out the door. There was no law against that. Where it got complicated was if she wanted to apply for another driving licence or passport: then she’d have to apply for an enrolled deed poll, which meant putting her new name on public record in order to access things like foreign travel. If she hadn’t done that, and Tasker had found no evidence of it, it meant there were a number of possibilities. One was that she’d died some time during the period between her leaving her family, and her driving licence and passport expiring – and if that were true, someone else, for whatever reason, did mail those condolence cards.
The second possibility was that she changed her name, but not o cially – an unenrolled change – which wouldn’t have brought her into the orbit of any o cial government apparatus. But it also would have stopped her from ever legally getting behind the wheel of a car, certainly ever boarding an airplane or ferry out of the UK .
Or there was a third option: she went the illegal route and absorbed someone else’s identity, which would allow her access to things like ID s and passports without ever risking popping up on the radar. The big question mark was whether Fiona would have had the kind of contacts she’d need in order to make that happen.
‘What about the MPU ?’ I asked. The Missing Persons Unit was
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the main UK agency for all unidentified people, bodies and remains. ‘Did you manage to speak to your guy over there?’
‘I forwarded him on the photo you sent me.’ It had been the digital version of the picture Rebekah had handed me this morning. ‘There’s nothing.’
‘No remains matching her physical description?’
‘He went all the way back to eighty-five for me. There’s a few vaguely in the same ballpark in terms of hair colour and age. But he’s pretty sure none of them are Fiona Murphy – at least based on the photograph you sent.’
For now, that was good enough for me.
‘Thanks again for this,’ I said.
‘Sorry I can’t stay longer.’ Tasker looked o towards Scotland Yard and checked his watch. ‘I better get back.’
‘Yeah, of course.’
‘So where are you o to now?’
I pocketed the USB stick.
‘I’m going to see what I can find out in Cambridge.’
Daughter
Rebekah | This Morning
As Rebekah exited the café that they’d met David Raker in, she wondered where he’d gone first, what his plans were, and whether he had a feel for this case already, an instinctive sense of where the search for Rebekah’s mother might end up.
I just hope it ends up somewhere, she thought. ‘He’s lost someone he loves.’
She turned and looked back at Frank. ‘Sorry?’
‘Raker. He’s lost someone he loves.’
‘I know.’ Frank had already done a background on David, and David had sat there himself this morning and told them his wife had passed on.
‘But it’s written in him,’ Frank said as the freezing morning air hit them both. ‘You can see it’s shaped who he is.’ For a moment, as she often did, Rebekah caught a glimpse of her father. Frank and her dad weren’t physically alike at all, but sometimes in the way they spoke, the similarities were so stark. ‘It’s important.’
‘His wife dying?’ Rebekah frowned. ‘I’m not sure he’d agree.’
‘No, what I mean is, you can see he uses her death.’
‘Uses it?’
‘He uses the grief as fuel.’ Frank glanced around him, taking in the city, its noise, its chaos. ‘I’ve got a feeling he’ll find the order in all of this.’
‘So you think he’s our man?’
‘Yes,’ Frank said. ‘I think he’s exactly our man.’
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On the train up to Cambridge, I took out my laptop, plugged in the flash drive that Tasker had given me and pulled everything o on to the desktop. There wasn’t much.
The background on Fiona Murphy – née Camberwell – was thin and based almost entirely on details she’d provided for her one and only passport application in 1979. And she didn’t seem to have used the passport much, even once she’d got it: a single trip to New York in 1980, just after Rebekah’s older brother Johnny was born.
At the time, Fiona’s address had been listed as a house in the King’s Hedges area of Cambridge, which Rebekah already confirmed had been the home in which she and her brothers had grown up. But under the former addresses section of Fiona’s passport application, she’d listed a street in a village called Settlebury, just south-west of the city. That, I assumed, was where she’d moved with her family after leaving Peterborough.
Before Rebekah ever landed in the UK , I’d trawled public records here, as well as tapping up a couple of sources, and had put together a picture of Fiona’s family. She had no siblings and her mother had died in 1966, shortly before Fiona turned eleven. The death certificate listed cause of death as a heart attack. It was impossible to say what Fiona’s relationship with her father had been like, but when he’d died in 1982, it was from a drug overdose, so it wasn’t hard to imagine her childhood as somewhat dsyfunctional. I’d been hoping the missing person’s report might add some colour to what I already knew, and answers to some of the questions I had.
It didn’t.
Other than confirmation that she had been born in March 1955,
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the report filed by Henry Murphy on Boxing Day night in 1985 was basically worthless. Even so, I tabbed through it, stopping on Henry’s description of the day in question: I was making some lunch out of leftovers from Christmas Day, and at approx. 11.30 a.m. realized I hadn’t seen Fiona in quite a while. I’d assumed she was upstairs with the children. When I went to check on her, I couldn’t find her. The children hadn’t seen her and Fiona wasn’t anywhere else in the house.
He noted the front door was unlocked, and they’d always kept it locked when they were home because they lived on a busy street and were worried about the kids wandering out. Henry also said that Fiona had removed her coat from a rack in the downstairs hallway; otherwise he wasn’t aware of her taking anything – not clothes, not cash – and her purse and handbag were still at home. He’d looked through the purse and found her ATM cards were there, as was £15 in change.
Tasker had been right in what he’d said to me earlier: in the subsequent investigation – small as it was – the cops considered Henry as a suspect in his wife going missing, but just as quickly dismissed him. He had a good reputation in the short time he was in the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, which he joined after leaving the air force, an exemplary military record, and character witnesses spoke highly of him as a softly spoken family man who adored his kids. To my mind, that wouldn’t have been enough to write him o entirely as a person of interest, but the cops at the time had clearly felt di erently and, pretty soon, with no other suspects and no evidence, the search for Fiona Murphy dried up.
I used the train’s Wi-Fi to go searching in Google for any mention of her. I’d done the search before, a couple of times, but this time I tried to cast the net wider based on some of the information in the missing person’s report.
Zero hits.
That could have meant the case never attracted the media attention it needed to sustain momentum at the time, or it could have been that its age and pre- internet status meant whatever had been written about Fiona back then had become lost over time. I could
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dig around in newspaper archives to fi nd out for sure, but my sense was that it would be a huge time sink for little or no reward. After all, if the police’s search for Fiona went nowhere quickly – which it did – they had nothing to feed the media with. With nothing to feed on, newspapers would just move on to the next story.
I closed my laptop and looked out of the window, watching as a patchwork quilt of flat, frozen fields whipped by, and again tried to line up possible explanations for Fiona walking out on her kids.
Postnatal depression?
So little was known about Fiona’s background: she could easily have been su ering from an undiagnosed mental health problem – and it could have been there from before she ever met Henry – and perhaps having kids exacerbated her sickness. Or maybe, if she had been su ering from postnatal depression, it only kicked in after giving birth to Mike: he was eighteen months when she disappeared, so still very young.
Bad marriage?
That might have been a contributor to Fiona having depression, but if there was no depression, and it was just a failing marriage, why leave your kids behind? Worse, why not get in touch with them afterwards – or, at least not for thirty-four years?
The other thing that kept coming back to me was that it was also hard to disappear, and stay hidden, even back then. It was 1985, so a time before mobiles, the internet and CCTV on every street corner, but even if Fiona wasn’t dealing with modern technology, she would have had to have coped with the psychological and emotional side of going missing: remembering a new name or an identity; trying to recall every detail of the back story you’ve invented for yourself; starting again with absolutely nothing – which Fiona, with no money or assets to her name, would have done – and never being able to let other people get too close to you for fear of giving yourself away. The perpetual cycle of secrets and rules ground most people down over time. They slipped. They made mistakes. Somewhere on the radar, they left a blip, however minor. The fact Fiona never did – at
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least until the cards turned up – was what was sticking with me. It either showed impressive levels of preparation and incredible discipline – or it showed something else.
I wrote down involuntary disappearance.
It showed she never planned to go missing at all.
It was three miles from the station to the King’s Hedges area of Cambridge – where the Murphys had lived – so I decided to walk it, needing to order my thoughts.
I circumvented the city centre, opting for the more direct route north, and, as I crossed the Cam, a brutal gust of wind hit me. I pulled my coat even tighter, put my head down and carried on my march into the suburbs. I’d hardly spent any time in Cambridge, didn’t know the city at all, so a part of the reason for making the trip up here was to paint a picture of the places that Rebekah – and, before her, Fiona – had grown up in. I didn’t expect to find anything – it was decades since they’d left – but I wanted to be able to visualize the places they’d inhabited.
I entered a maze of flats, terraced houses and garages and followed a footpath along the flank of a park. Soon I found my way to the former home of the Murphys: a yellow-brick, two-storey midterrace, half-hidden behind a five-foot wall, on a busy through-road. The area mostly seemed to be council housing, a tight network of small, identical homes, and while it was a little run-down in places, none of that would have mattered to Rebekah.
For the time they were here, she’d told me they’d been happy.
I took a couple of pictures of the house and then did some more circuits of the surrounding area. When I got back to the property, I tried to imagine the day Fiona left, where she might have gone and what she may have been thinking. The nearest train station was three miles away, but there were bus stops all over, including a bus shelter – which could have been here in some form in 1985 – a few yards away. If she’d got on a bus, where had she headed? And if she didn’t use public transport, what then? Could she have walked to a prearranged meeting place? Who had she been meeting?
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The address in Settlebury – the village Fiona had lived in after her family had moved here from Peterborough, and before she and Henry Murphy had got the house together in Cambridge – was four miles south of the city centre, seven from where I was, so I decided against walking, and waited for an Uber out on the main road.
When I got to the village, it was little more than a single road fringed by quaint red-bricked buildings. A pub in the centre was thatched, its walls covered by a sea of vines, the grass out front sti and frosted. I used my phone to lead the way to the site of Fiona’s former home: it took me out of the heart of the village and into a road with sculpted hedgerows on either side and narrow lanes peeling o at irregular intervals.
Each of the lanes led down to a grouping of cottages.
After a while, I began wondering if the mapped route on my phone had taken me too far because the lanes halted, the hedgerows clotted and the cottages vanished.
But then I reached another property.
It was the last house in the village, and set back from the road just like all the others. By now, the hedgerows were gone, replaced by a bank of opaque firs, thick as concrete. I checked my phone, saw the pin was dropped into the house on the other side of them, and kept going. A loose stone path had been laid along a shallow grass bank, the bank segregating the fir trees from the road. After a minute, the fir trees ceased and I got to the gate of the house that Fiona had grown up in.
Except it wasn’t a cottage like all the others in the village.
It was a mansion.
The house was Georgian, a mix of light stone and white render, and sat on its own amongst sweeping, manicured grounds. It was beautiful. To the left was a sunroom, extending out from the property, with a grey slate roof, and to the right were a series of tiered, walled gardens descending into a hexagonal seating area.
There was an intercom embedded in a pillar outside the main gates, so I pushed it and waited, trying to gather my thoughts. What did it mean that Fiona had lived here? The size and majesty of this home couldn’t have been further from the council house in King’s Hedges she’d shared with Henry, Rebekah, Johnny and Mike.
‘Yes?’
It sounded like an older man.
There was a small camera above a number pad on the pillar, so I held a business card up in front of it and said, ‘Hi, my name’s David Raker. I’m a missing persons investigator. I’m not sure if you can help me or not, but I’m looking into the disappearance of a woman called Fiona Murphy, or Camberwell as she was –’
‘Fiona?’
I stopped, dropping the business card away from the camera. I looked into the lens. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Fiona Murph—’
‘Who are you working for?’
‘No one. I work for myself.’
‘You’re not with the police?’
‘No.’
‘So why are you looking for Fiona?’
‘Her daughter has asked me to find her.’
A pause. ‘Her daughter?’
‘Yes.’
Nothing from the other end of the line this time.
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‘Hello?’
As I looked at the house, searching for movement in the sunroom or behind any of the windows, I started to wonder if the guy had hung up on me.
But then, with a buzz, the gate began to shift.
I stepped through the gap and followed a gravel driveway down, between more fir trees, to the sweeping front steps of the house. Just as I got to the bottom of them, the front door opened, a huge slab of burnished oak that creaked back slowly on its hinges. A woman appeared. She was in her mid-forties, serious-looking, her hair scraped back into a business-like ponytail, and she was wearing magenta scrubs and holding a blood pressure monitor by the cu . She looked me up and down – like I’d already done something seriously wrong – then opened the door a little further to reveal a grand staircase and a hallway with polished checkerboard floors.
‘He’s in the study at the top,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you’re here, but don’t get him over-excited.’ She held up the monitor. ‘Last thing I need is you marching out of here in ten minutes and leaving him with sky-high BP.’
‘I’ll be on my best behaviour.’
She just nodded.
‘I didn’t catch your employer’s name at the gate?’
She studied me, something flickering in her face. ‘Oh,’ she said, and then left me hanging for a moment. ‘I’m guessing you’re some kind of investigator.’
‘What would make you think that?’
‘Because it’s the only reason he’d invite a total stranger into his house.’
‘What do you mean?’
She glanced up the stairs behind her.
‘I mean, I’m guessing this has something to do with his daughter.’
The Tourist
Tom | This Morning
Tom Brenner hurried out of the doors of the hotel in King’s Cross.
It was a vast labyrinth of rooms constructed five years earlier in the even vaster shadow of the station. But as Tom headed south, he barely noticed any of it.
At the corner of York Way and Pentonville Road, he crossed the street, darting between oncoming cars, and made a beeline for the payphone outside Five Guys. The glass on the booth was misty with spray paint, messages scrawled over it, and inside the confines of the phone box, the city noise faded. Tom felt like he was hiding.
I wish I could.
I wish I could take Sadie and Leo and just hide.
The scream of a siren filled the air, ripping him from his thoughts, as a police car whipped past. He watched its lights flashing, neon blue illuminating the frozen windows of the street outside – and then it was gone again, and it was just him, here.
This booth. This phone.
This call.
He picked up the handset, so nervous his fingers were vibrating, and dropped a fifty-pence piece into the slot. She’d told him not to use a bank card, only coins. Once he saw the credit on the display, he went to his pocket.
Inside was a napkin.
On the napkin was her number.
He dialled it slowly, each button press like a little stab of pain, because every button inched him closer to the call connecting, to setting this whole thing in motion.
It started to ring.
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You’re doing the right thing, he said to himself, and then repeated it again out loud: ‘You’re doing the right thing.’ Sadie will be proud of you. Leo will be proud of –
‘Hello?’
Tom cleared his throat. ‘It’s me again.’
He heard her moving. She was on her mobile. She’d told him that if anyone went through her records, no one would be able to connect him to the payphone he was using because there was no CCTV close enough to ID him. As he remembered her saying that, he looked out, searching the buildings close by for video. She was right. He couldn’t see any cameras at this end of Pentonville Road. The nearest one seemed to be on the train station across the street, and that was facing away from him. It made him wonder how she would know something like that – something so specific.
How many times had she done this before?
How many other people had phoned her from here?
‘You still there?’ she said, coming back on the line.
‘Yes.’ Tom swallowed, looking through the gra ti again, to the cars, the people, the swell of the crowds at the train station. ‘We should go to the police.’
‘I told you last night, eventually we will.’
‘We should do it now.’
‘We don’t know who we can trust in the police.’
‘They’re the police,’ Tom said, desperation in his voice.
‘Tom,’ she replied instantly, using his name to shut down the doubts that were starting to crush every organ in his body. He felt sick; felt like he was about to faint.
He looked at the napkin, at her number.
What have I started?
‘Tom,’ she repeated. ‘Is it him?’
And Tom thought, It’s already too late.
Even if I wanted to, I can’t back out.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s him.’
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The flight landed at Heathrow just before 7 a.m.
As the seatbelt lights went o , he stayed where he was, in a window seat midway down the plane, and watched everyone around him start furiously jostling for position. They were all so desperate to get their coats on and their bags down, and yet they must have known what would happen next: they’d stand there waiting for the doors to open, all packed in like sardines.
He stared out of the window, the skies grey over the terminal. A luggage vehicle was winding its way towards them, the driver being pelted by rain. This was exactly the type of weather that worried him: he figured he could put up with it for a few weeks, maybe a few months, but he’d heard that British summers could be like this as well – wet, and relentless, and grim – and he wasn’t sure he could handle it. Not that he had much choice now: he either handled it, or he got back on a plane tomorrow and headed home.
And he couldn’t go home.
Not ever.
Slowly everything around him faded out – the other passengers, the hum of all their conversations, the low hiss of the air conditioning – and his head was filled with images of the place he’d lived in for so long. He saw himself barbecuing steaks, he and the guys he’d worked with sitting around in a circle, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. And then he saw something else: a farm, out in the middle of nowhere, a single, long dirt track the only way in and out; he saw the land it occupied, the pale grass that surrounded it, and the way it perpetually seemed to be moving; and then he saw the farmhouse itself in the centre of everything, elevated so it had a view of approaching vehicles. Its walls were a plain white, its exterior so unassuming no one passing on the main road – if they could even see it from that far away – had a clue about what went on inside.
‘What do you tell your children you do?’
35
Unknown | February 1985
He kept hearing her voice.
‘What lies do you tell them when you go home to them at night?’
Around him, people started moving down the aisle.
It yanked him back into the present and, after a moment of disorientation, he saw that the couple who’d sat next to him on the flight were now gone. He shu ed along the vacated seats, got his bag out of the overhead locker, and then followed the other passengers out, into the bridge. The farmhouse still lingered behind his eyes, like an after-image that wouldn’t fade.
He picked up his pace, accelerating away from the other passengers. He was thirty-five, strong, fit, and as he walked, his thoughts switched to the next part of this journey: getting past immigration without raising any alarms.
Feeling around in his pocket, he got out his passport and looked at the photo inside, the starkness of his expression. There was no hint about the man who existed below the surface. He looked like the people in the photographs he used to pin to the walls of the farm: blank, unreadable.
They were hiding secrets. So am I.
He headed for the stairs instead of the escalator, and joined the queue for international arrivals. As he waited, he took in the passport booths up front, manned by five men and one woman in matching uniforms, and tried to get a read on each of them. If he could get one over the other because they were more pleasant, or less inquisitive, or more relaxed, he would do his best to – although if he let people keep going ahead of him until he got the o cial that looked most amenable, it would get him noticed. Getting noticed meant questions.
Questions meant danger.
His heart was beating a little faster now: he was five people from the front, and based on his training, his instincts, on being able to lip-read some of what the o cials were saying, he’d decided that the guy in the middle – a plump man in his early forties – was the best. He seemed friendly, but not overly so. Too friendly, and it was often a disguise for someone who liked asking subtle, probing
36
questions. On the other hand, if they were uncommunicative – like one of the other o cials here – they were the type who considered this job on a par with working for the secret service. That meant they’d try to sweat you just because they had a small amount of power to wield.
He got to the front of the queue.
At the far end, the woman waved him over. He hadn’t been able to see much in her face, which concerned him because he’d spent a good chunk of his life reading people and even the most sober of expressions normally revealed something. As he got to the desk and put down his passport, he said, ‘Good morning.’ She didn’t say anything in return and looked up at him. As he held her eye, her gaze quickly shifted to his passport, and that was when he knew he was going to be fine.
She was introverted, maybe even shy.
Being shy was a weakness.
‘What’s the purpose of your visit?’ she asked, without making eye contact.
‘Well, I’ve never been to London, so . . .’
He left it hanging.
It forced her to look at him.
‘I’m just here to enjoy all the tourist stu .’
‘You’ve never been to London before?’ she replied, immediately looking away from him again, back to his passport. She sounded surprised, the inference in her question clear: he’d come from a country that was only two hours’ flight away. But he already knew he was dictating the course of this conversation now, not her. He could feel it like a charge in his veins, the same hum in his blood that he used to get at the farm, when he knew he’d won. He’d spent the flight worrying about landing an o cial that would see through him, someone smart enough to ask questions that could hurt him, and reveal the lies he’d buried.
Instead, he’d got this bitch.
A worthless nobody.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Never had the chance until now.’
37
Her eyes flicked to him again, and then she reached for a stamp, marked a page in the passport, and slapped it on to the desk.
‘Thank you,’ he said, picking up his passport.
And then he was through, on the escalator down to the baggage hall, another excited tourist on their way to Big Ben, and Buckingham Palace, and Oxford Street.
Except he wasn’t a tourist.
He hadn’t come to London to see the sights.
He’d come here to disappear.
I moved up the staircase, deeper into the mansion Fiona Murphy had lived in.
The first door at the top was a study, but my attention was drawn more to a series of photographs lining the wall on my left. They were all of the same man. The nurse – who had introduced herself as Mary – said he was the owner of the house as well as the person who’d spoken to me on the intercom. His name was Jonah Carling.
And he’d referred to Fiona as his daughter.
I looked for her in the photographs. They went back years and Carling was in all of them, starting o as a bull of a man in his twenties and thirties until the decline started setting in in his later years. He stopped mounting pictures of himself in his seventies and eighties, except for one where he was leaning on a walking stick, his face liver-spotted, his eyes milky, shaking hands with a former US President at a charity event. The bull of the man was lost forever. In the end, nothing – not even money – could stop time.
I didn’t see Fiona in any of the shots, so wasn’t entirely clear what relationship this man had with her. Because, whatever he claimed, he definitely wasn’t her real father. Fiona’s father had died only a couple of months after Rebekah was born, and – as far as I could tell in the background I had put together – Fiona’s family tree had few other roots. Her mother and father were both only children, so Carling wasn’t an uncle, and you had to go back two generations to find anything in the way of extended family, and elderly as Carling appeared to be, he’d have needed to be thirty years older to be a grandparent.
At the top of the stairs, I paused, taking in the study. It was stately, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a hardwood desk with a PC on it. It was on and I could see a window open, with a colour image: the
39 7
view from the gatepost camera. I knocked once and heard movement. A sluggish shu e of feet. The tap of a walking stick.
Jonah Carling emerged into view.
He looked even older now than he had in the photo of him with the President. He must have been in his early nineties, a jaundiced pallor to his skin, a narrow wisp of grey hair clinging to his pink scalp like a cloud skimming the apex of a ridge. He was in pyjamas and a pair of slippers.
‘Mr Carling?’
‘Jonah,’ he wheezed, retreating back the way he’d come, inviting me to follow him. When I did, I could see that he had a bed set up in front of a window that looked over the tiered garden. With e ort, he climbed back under the sheets. ‘She says I have to rest,’ he said, his voice hoarse, and leaned his stick against a table with an iPad and some water on it. ‘And I don’t want to upset her.’
He said it with a smile, showing me a mouth full of yellow teeth, but I imagined it wasn’t far from the truth: the nurse didn’t strike me as someone to be messed with.
‘Please,’ he said, and pointed towards a grey bucket chair, sitting amongst a group of others. By the time I’d grabbed it and pulled it back towards him, Carling was fully settled.
‘Thank you for seeing me,’ I said. ‘This is unexpected.’
‘You said you find missing people?’
‘I do.’
His eyebrows kicked up. ‘And you said Fiona had a daughter?’
‘Yes. A daughter and two sons.’
‘My goodness. With who?’
‘With a man called Henry Murphy.’
I could see in his face that the name didn’t seem to mean anything to him. In fact, he appeared completely thrown by all of this: Henry, Rebekah, her brothers. He shook his head: ‘I had no idea Fiona became a mother.’
‘Your nurse referred to Fiona as your “daughter”,’ I said.
He smiled a little. ‘A colloquial term.’
‘So can I ask what your relationship was to her?’
40
‘She lived with me for seven years.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes. Between the ages of eleven and eighteen.’
It was a small echo of Rebekah’s life. She’d spent the equivalent seven years on a sports scholarship in a boarding school in London. At the same age, her mother had been in this house, living with a millionaire.
‘How did she end up here?’ I asked.
He nodded, as if that was exactly the question he would have been posing himself. ‘I was kind of a . . .’ He paused, rolled his head a little. ‘I was friendly with Fiona’s mum, Cassandra.’ I saw it instantly, like a light had switched on behind the pearls of his eyes: he’d been fond of Fiona’s mother – or maybe something that had gone way beyond just ‘fond’. ‘Cass and I grew up together.’
‘And after you grew up?’
His eyes came back to me and he could see I’d already skipped ahead; that he had given himself away. ‘We dated for a while, yes,’ he said. ‘She was the first woman I ever loved. Maybe the only woman.’ He looked around the room, and then out of the window, the memories flooding him. I started to get a sense for something: that his involvement in Fiona’s life, in bringing her here, may have been some sort of redemptive arc; a way for him to make up for things he hadn’t done but should have.
In my work, regret had become easy to recognize.
‘I took my eyes o the prize,’ he said ruefully, and started to adjust the bedding at his waist, his narrow, emaciated fingers playing with the starched sheets.
‘Is that why Cassandra ended up with Fiona’s dad and not you?’
‘My upbringing,’ he said, looking out at the room again, ‘it was dirt poor. Mine and Cassandra’s families, we lived next door to one another, these two awful, broken houses that were constantly on the verge of collapse. I swore my life was going to be di erent. Better. And that’s why I got into the markets. By the time I was twenty-five, I’d made my first million . . .’ And then he stopped, his words ceasing, his fingers halting their movement at the hem of the sheet. ‘But
41
