All homes close to the Tube stations.
All stops on the Circle line.
He was using it as his hunting ground, watching the men, following them, getting to know their routines and then moving in for them. He knew the Underground stations.
Because he worked them.
I’d looked right at him so many times in the footage as he’d moved around inside the carriage, his face a blur behind the glass. I’d watched so many times as he’d stepped out onto the platform, the sign shielding him and his victim from the cameras – and not once had I put it together.
But I knew why I had today.
His clothes were different from the uniform he should have been wearing on a Friday morning, and maybe he’d thought that was what would make him blend in. But, ultimately, it was the change of clothes that had given him away. Because now I saw why this time, of all times, I’d been drawn to him: a red T-shirt with checked sleeves. The same top I’d seen in his gym bag earlier in the day.
The Snatcher knew the Circle line because he worked it.
The Snatcher was Edwin Smart.
69
As I drove, I jammed my phone into the hands-free and dialled Healy’s number. It rang and rang, with no answer. Finally, after half a minute, it clicked and went to voicemail.
‘This is Healy, leave a message.’
‘Shit.’ I waited for the beep. ‘Healy, it’s me. Everything’s changed. It’s not Sam or Pell you should be looking for, it’s a guy called Edwin Smart. He’s a ticket inspector on the Circle line. He took Sam. He took all of them. You need to tell Craw right now.’
I killed the call, my mind turning over.
Craw.
I dialled the station that the Snatcher task force were working out of, then asked to be connected to Craw. ‘She’s out in the field at the moment, sir, and I’m afraid I can’t –’
‘Wherever she is, she’s at the wrong place.’
‘Well, sir, I can’t –’
‘No, listen to me: you need to connect me unless you want her to get back and find out you are the reason she couldn’t stop a killer disappearing for good.’
A pause. Then the line connected.
It rang ten times with no answer and then went silent. A click. And then it started to ring again. She was redirecting my call. On the third ring, someone picked up.
‘Davidson.’
Shit. Anyone but Davidson.
‘Davidson, it’s David Raker.’
A snort. ‘What the fuck do you want?’
‘Sam Wren isn’t the Snatcher.’
‘What? I thought we made it clear to you –’
‘Just listen to me –’
‘No, you listen to me, you weaselly piece of shit. You and that fucking sideshow Healy are done. You get it? He’s cooked, and when he’s done I’m gonna find the hole in your story and I’m gonna hang you out to dry. You think you’re some sort of vigilante, is that it? You’re nothing. Zero. And you’re gonna be even less than that when I’m done.’
‘Do what you have to do, but you need to hear this.’
‘I need to hear this?’
‘Sam Wren isn’t the guy you need to be looking for, it’s a –’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re done.’
And then he hung up.
I smashed my fists against the steering wheel and looked out into the rain. Healy’s cooked. Had they found out about him working the case off the books? A fleeting thought passed through my head – a moment where I wondered how he would react to that, and how he might endanger himself and the people around him – and then my mind switched back to Smart. I dialled Directory Enquiries and got them to put me through to Gloucester Road station. After three rings, a woman picked up.
‘How can I help you?’ she asked.
‘I’m looking for a revenue control inspector.’
‘You’d be better off calling the depot at Hammersmith.’
‘His name’s Edwin Smart.’
He could have been at any station on the line, not just Gloucester Road. But I’d found him twice there and he seemed to know the people who worked in and around it. They liked him, he liked them – or, at least, he pretended to. But he could put on a show, and he could manipulate those around him, starting with Sam Wren and Duncan Pell.
‘Do you know him at all?’ I pressed.
‘Edwin Smart?’
‘Yes.’
She paused. ‘What did you say your name was, sir?’
‘Detective Sergeant Davidson.’
I could sense a change, without any words even being spoken. Most people, even people who knew they had a duty to protect people’s privacy, started to get nervous when the police came calling. ‘Uh …’ She stopped again. ‘Uh, I’m not really, uh …’
I recognized the voice then: Sandra Purnell. The woman I’d spoken to in the staffroom, and the woman who had hugged Smart as I’d been about to approach him.
Something had been up with Smart.
‘He’s not in any trouble,’ I said. ‘I just need to speak to him.’
She cleared her throat. ‘He’s out for the rest of the day.’
‘Out on the line?’
‘No. He’s doing a half-day.’
‘He’s on holiday?’
‘Well, it’s 18 June.’
‘What’s the significance of that?’
‘He always takes 18 June off. It’s the anniversary.’
‘Of what?’
A pause. ‘Of his dad dying.’
I was heading along Uxbridge Road, waiting for Spike to call me back with an address for Smart. He was exdirectory, with no trail on the internet. No Facebook page. No Twitter feed. No LinkedIn profile. No stories about him in local newspapers. None of the usual ways people left footprints. But as the woman at Gloucester Road told me about his father, something shifted into focus and, as it formed in my head, I pulled a turn into a side road and bumped up onto the pavement in order to let it come together.
I leaned into the phone. ‘What did his dad die of?’
‘What?’
‘Do you know what his dad died of?’
‘Uh … cancer.’
I killed the call and sat back in my seat.
Whatever he was doing with the men after he took them, he was doing because of what his dad had done to him. You didn’t need to be a profiler to work that out. Killers were made, not born; the cycles of abuse rippled through from one generation to the next. But I imagined that when, in Edwin Smart’s childhood, the abuse – in whatever form it got dished out – finally stopped, it was because his father got cancer. And when his father got cancer, he was left with no hair.
Just like the Snatcher victims.
He shaved their heads to make them like his father.
Daddy
Jonathan Drake woke with a jolt. Darkness all around him, everywhere, in every corner of whatever space he was being kept in. He’d been moved again. Every time he slept, he was shifted around the room. Most times he was conscious of it happening, but he didn’t do anything about it. He was too scared. He just lay there, limp, as the man slid fingers under his naked body, as hands pinched his skin – the feel of them sending goosebumps scattering across Drake’s body – and he pretended he was asleep. It was safer not to fight. Sometimes, though, he wouldn’t know he’d been moved until he woke up. He imagined those times the man had drugged him. Then, when Drake felt in the darkness for the things around him he’d become familiar with, and instead realized there was nothing he could seek comfort in, panic would spread through his body.
He was face down on the floor this time, stomach in a patch of something wet, ankle bound to the wall behind him. He just lay there, looking off into the dark, trying to force his eyes to form shapes in front of him. But there was nothing, just like every other time. He closed his eyes and listened. He could hear something faintly, but whatever it was it wasn’t coming from outside. The only noises that drifted around the room were those from inside it: the soft sound of electricity, and water dripping rhythmically somewhere close by. Sometimes he listened to the sound and used it to focus his mind, wondering how long he’d been kept here, and what was to come.