I sat still for a moment and composed myself. Studied my reflection.
Who are you?
I wasn’t the same man who had worked that first missing persons case. I wasn’t even the same man who had woken up the day before. I’d killed twice. I knew that changed me; a part of me knew it changed everything. Suddenly, I was capable of ending a life; of looking into another man’s eyes and, for a split second, losing enough control to pull the trigger. Somewhere buried beneath the surface I’d discovered a man I knew nothing of.
A man who knew nothing of order.
I wondered, for a moment, what Derryn would have made of what I’d done. Would she still have trusted me? Would she still have wanted to lie next to me in our bed? Would she have been able to feel a change in me, a sudden barrier between us, as if there were two men now — the one she had always known, and the one she didn’t recognize.
I started up the car and turned on the heaters.
As air pumped into my face, I realized the thing she’d probably have been most scared of was that I felt so little for what I’d done. I’d killed, but I wasn’t a killer. I’d done what I’d needed to do in order to come out of those woods alive. I didn’t want to have to do it again, but I knew, in some part of me, if I had to, I would. They’d come for me, and when they did, I’d pull the trigger again. Maybe that made me less than the man Derryn would have wanted me to be. But this wasn’t about missing people any more.
This was about survival.
I looked at the clock. 7.49. They all thought I was dead now, so I had to use that. We must have been gone a couple of hours, and burying a body would take another couple on top of that. That gave me two, three hours tops before they realized Zack and Jason weren’t coming back.
28
The place where I was supposed to have died wasn’t on the map they had in the car. But when I finally pulled up at the main road, four miles down a winding gravel path, I saw we were about twenty miles from Bristol, in the middle of the Mendips.
In the glove compartment there was a phone, empty like the last one of theirs I’d found. No names in it. No recent calls. I sat there for a moment, deciding what to do next, then used the phone to dial into my answerphone at home. I had one message. It was John Cary. He’d rung the previous day, at five o’clock in the evening.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said. ‘Call me.’ He left a number. There was a pen in one of the side pockets on the door. I took it out and scrawled his number on the back of my hand, then called him. He answered after two rings.
‘John, it’s David Raker.’
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ he said. He sounded annoyed. ‘You ever answer your phone?’
‘I’ve been…’ I paused.
Should I tell him?
The truth was, I could use some help. I could use some protection too. But I’d just left two dead bodies lying in woodland four miles behind me. And if I told him that, I had to tell him everything else, and face whatever consequences came with it. And I wasn’t ready to give this case — or myself — up. Not yet.
‘I’ve been busy,’ I said finally.
‘Yeah, well, that makes two of us. Let me transfer you.’ I waited. Two clicks and he was back on, whispering this time. ‘I got your stuff back from the lab. If you get anything out of this, that’s great. You take it as far as you want. But whatever you choose to do with it, I don’t want to be kept informed. Understood?’
I paused. A bizarre start.
‘Understood?’ he said again.
‘Understood.’
‘Okay,’ he continued, ‘so the lab lightened the Polaroid. Alex is in the middle of the shot, in what looks like the front bedroom of a house. The whole background is a little out of focus, but there’s clearly a window behind him, and on the other side of that, some kind of veranda. To me, it looks like the type of thing you’d get on the front of a farmhouse.’
‘Anything else visible through the window?’
‘Just grass and sky.’
‘No recognizable landmarks?’
‘No. It’s taken from a weird angle. Kind of shot from below. Alex is looking down. The window, and the veranda, they’re both on a slant because of the angle. You on email there?’
‘Uh, I’m not at home.’
‘I can email you a copy.’
‘Okay. Email it to my Yahoo.’ I gave him my address.
‘You asked about prints before,’ he said.
‘Right.’
There was a hesitant pause. ‘There’s two sets of prints.’
‘Okay.’
‘You know a Stephen Myzwik?’
‘Is that a Stephen with a ph?’
‘Yeah.’
Something sparked. The name was on the pad I took from Eagle Heights.
Paul. Stephen. Zack.
‘Maybe.’
‘Stephen Myzwik, aka Stephen Milton. Thirty-two years of age, born in Poland, moved to London, served ten years for stabbing a sixty-year-old man with a piece of glass. After that, he violated the terms of his parole, and, under the alias of Stephen Michaels, used a fraudulent credit card to rent a vehicle in Liverpool.’
I could hear him turning pages. He’d obviously printed them out from HOLMES — the police database where all serious cases were logged — like he’d done for me a couple of days before.
‘Wait a minute…’
‘What?’
‘There’s stuff missing here.’
I thought of something.
‘There were pages missing in Alex’s file as well.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was going to ask you about them.’
‘What was missing?’
‘A couple of pages. Some of the forensic stuff. The pathologist’s report.’
More pages being turned.
‘Where the fuck have they gone?’
‘Has someone deleted them?’
‘Deleted information from the computer?’ A long silence came down the line. I could hear him flicking through the file, faster this time. Then he stopped. ‘This file’s fucked.’
Something had got to him. Something more than just pages missing from a file.
‘Do you want me to call you back?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got time for this shit. I’ll look into it later. Let’s just get it over and done with.’ He started on the file again. Pages turned. ‘He’s dead, anyway.’
‘Who, Myzwik?’
‘Yeah.’
Somehow another dead body wasn’t all that surprising. First Alex, then Jade, now Myzwik: all of them dead — or supposed to be.
‘How’d he die?’
‘Looks like his body was dumped in a reservoir near here.’
‘Near Bristol?’
‘Yeah. Divers dredged him up about two months later. He must have made some dangerous friends.’
‘How come?’
‘His head had been stoved in with a baseball bat, and both his hands were found on the other side of the reservoir.’
‘They’d been chopped off?’
‘With a bandsaw.’
Just like Jade.
I heard Cary flicking through more pages.
‘You said there were a second set of fingerprints?’
‘Yeah. They’re Alex’s.’
‘That’s not such a surprise, is it?’
‘Depends,’ he replied. ‘We took Alex’s prints off some of the stuff he left behind when he went missing. I did that — set up the missing persons file myself.’