The Vanishing Read online

‘Beautiful, isn’t it,’ she said.

  ‘Sudden,’ he said. ‘It was still daylight when I was in the shower.’

  ‘It takes about half an hour,’ she said. ‘Day to night in half an hour. It’s because we’re near the equator. You live in London, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ He stepped inside.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Would you like a drink? Another beer? We found a full crate in the fridge, and luckily the electricity is OK today. This is Janine Mailot. She does blood analysis as part of a project we have here. We’re trying to work out why the black mandrills are dying out, trying to stop the decline. She’s also a great friend.’

  She’d already been introduced to him, though not like that. He smiled at her, sat down on the same side as her, one chair removed, so that he could look across at Sara Eaton. He said he would like a glass of water.

  She turned to the wall behind her – where there was another entrance – and said something in French. A tall man emerged from the shadows by the steps there, very black, with a gun slung over his shoulder. He looked hard at Tom, then walked off.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive the weapons, Mr Lomax,’ she said. ‘It’s always like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Wherever I am there’s some type of security. It’s been like that all my life. Worse recently. Pirates, kidnappers, et cetera. It’s part of the fabric – you learn to ignore it. He’ll bring you some water. And some lemonade we made this afternoon. It’s very refreshing. Better than water. We can eat whenever you like. Would you like to eat here or inside?’

  He shrugged. He would have preferred her to just tell him what she wanted, but it was her call, and she was paying nicely, so if chit-chat about dinner and lemonade was what it took he could oblige. ‘Anywhere is good, Miss Eaton,’ he said.

  ‘You can call me Sara,’ she said. ‘In fact you must. Everything is first names on this island. Can I call you Tom?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You live in London, Tom,’ she continued, barely pausing for breath. ‘You have a child, aged eight, and you’re divorced. You work for the Metropolitan Police as a detective. That’s the sum of what I know about you.’

  That took him by surprise. Now he had to think quickly. He’d been assuming he was here because he was a private investigator, because she wanted some work done. The question of why someone like Sara Eaton would select someone like him for anything was a pressing issue, but he was assuming that that was nevertheless what had to have happened. Only now he realised, the same as the flunkey in London, she didn’t even know that he had left the police. So why was he here? ‘How did you find all that out?’ he asked, stalling, trying to work it out.

  ‘We paid. An agency provided a report.’

  He was interested in which ‘agency’, and how much she’d paid, but didn’t ask. ‘They didn’t give you very good value for money,’ he said. ‘Five pieces of information and two are wrong. My boy’s seven, not eight, and I quit the police three years ago. I told your man in London that.’ He waited for a reaction, but there was none he could read. ‘Which leaves me a bit confused,’ he continued. ‘Now I’m even more puzzled as to why you’ve brought me here.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She turned to the other woman, who had been quietly watching. ‘Could you excuse us, Janine? Please? We have to discuss some matters in private.’

  The ‘great friend’ stood at once – presumably she had been warned this would happen. She went round the table and kissed Sara quickly on one cheek, said something quietly in French, then nodded politely at Tom.

  ‘So you’re no longer a policeman,’ Sara said, once they were alone. ‘What do you do now?’

  ‘Private enquiries.’ He almost cringed as he said it.

  ‘A private investigator?’ She gave a little ironic smile, kept her eyes on his. ‘We’ve used a few in the US – the family, I mean. I didn’t think they existed in the UK.’

  ‘Maybe I’m the only one.’

  She laughed. ‘And you thought I brought you out here to hire you. I understand now.’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘No. Sorry. Though you will be remunerated, of course.’ She kept staring at him, the smile lingering. He found it uncomfortable. She was beautiful, he thought, though not perfect, because there was something about the positioning of her eyes and the expression on her face which made it look like she was always about to laugh at you – and maybe she was. But the inner confidence came straight at you. It was rare that you met people who were completely comfortable with themselves. She had that. It gave her a certain presence. He wondered if she was aware of it.

  ‘So why am I here?’ he asked.

  She opened her mouth to reply just as the guard reappeared, bearing a jug in each hand. He set them on the table with too loud a noise – not part of his job description, perhaps – raising a frown from his employer. A pretty young girl followed him – short, with long, tightly curled jet-black hair and coal-black skin. She put a tray and glasses on the table, then started to pour them both lemonade and set out little bowls of some kind of snack. The man stood to one side. Sara waited – clearly not keen to speak while they were there.

  Something like an awkward silence developed. ‘This is an amazing place,’ he said to fill it. ‘Do you actually live here?’ The island had looked small from the air, and mainly jungle – the sort of place it might be OK to visit for a two-week holiday.

  ‘We’re here for the project,’ Sara said. ‘Though I did grow up here. I don’t usually stay all year now – the island is tiny, after all. It takes only a couple of hours to get to the other end in a jeep. We keep eight permanent staff here, though. They’re here all year round.’

  ‘“We”?’

  She shrugged. ‘I just meant the organisation here.’ She waved a hand at the girl, as an example.

  ‘The monkey project?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s what you do?’

  ‘At the moment. Yes.’

  He caught the defensive tone. No doubt what she ‘did’ was actually nothing.

  ‘You’re a scientist, then?’ he asked. ‘Like Janine?’

  ‘I don’t have a qualification,’ she said, frowning. ‘Is that what you mean? I dropped out of uni last year. I’m only twenty, though very nearly twenty-one. Too young to be an expert on anything.’ She switched to that queer smile again, those intense green eyes coming back to his. He made himself stare back this time, but it didn’t work. It felt like he was being aggressive, when all she was doing was looking at him. She was several years younger than him, he reminded himself, and rich. Maybe she wasn’t used to dealing with ordinary people, didn’t know it was considered rude to stare.

  He pointed to the bruise under his eye – perhaps that was what she was looking at. ‘I got that yesterday afternoon, at a football match with my son.’ It wasn’t quite a lie.

  ‘I hope it’s OK,’ she said. ‘It looks painful. If you need a doctor …’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘… I was going to say – the nearest one is several hours away and we can’t get you there until morning …’

  The girl finally stepped away. The man had already vanished into the shadows. Tom took a sip of the lemonade. It was delicious – cold, sharp and sweet. Just the ticket. He held the glass up to her, waiting for her to start, to tell him what it was about, but saw that she was just sitting there, still doing it, staring. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘Your eyes,’ she said, very quietly. ‘Your eyes are incredible. Do people tell you that all the time?’

  He swallowed, embarrassed. She was looking at his eyes – not looking at him. Like they were a flower or a butterfly out in the forest. As far as he was aware there was nothing particularly special or unusual about his eyes.

  ‘Is that why you brought me here?’ he asked. ‘Because you heard about my eyes?’

  She laughed again, then tu
rned serious without warning. ‘I asked you to come because you know my mother.’

  That caught him. He frowned at her. ‘Your mother? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Elizabeth Wellbeck.’

  He shook his head, tried quickly to get away from the small talk. ‘Elizabeth Wellbeck? That rings no bells. I mean, I came across a lot of people when I was in the job, obviously. Maybe I met her then. Maybe she was burgled and I took a statement off her, for example, but if so I don’t recall. Why do you say I know her?’

  She pulled something from her trouser pocket, a sheet of paper, unfolded it and passed it to him. ‘That’s a letter my mother wrote to a friend,’ she said. ‘That’s why I asked you out here. Please read it.’

  He pulled it over and tried to read it. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Is it in English?’

  She laughed. ‘Sorry. That’s her handwriting. Yes. It’s in English.’ She read it to him: ‘My Dearest Felice. What I did is unforgivable, unspeakable – I can live no longer with the burden of it. I feel a filthy disgust in my heart. I cannot put things right, but I must try to help those I have inflicted with suffering and loss, before it’s all too late. I cannot leave this wretched place, so it is up to Sara now. She needs to contact a man called Tom Lomax, in the Metropolitan Police, in London. He will tell her why. He knows it all. Elizabeth Wellbeck-Eaton.’

  He knew immediately what had happened, of course. Tom Lomax/John Lomax. His father was John Lomax. Easy mistake to make. Plus, his father’s middle name was Tom and at work people had called him that. So somebody had screwed up – it was his father they were after, not him. His father had been a detective superintendent on Major Inquiries, a senior investigating officer – much more likely to have had something to do with someone super-rich, like this girl’s mother. If Elizabeth Wellbeck-Eaton had had some trouble it wouldn’t have come to a DC like Tom. He had a sinking feeling in his heart as he realised the error. He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But that makes no sense at all to me.’

  She thought about that in silence for a while, then folded the letter and put it back in her pocket. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s eat. We can come back to business later.’ She smiled that smile again. ‘Shall we open a bottle of wine?’

  7

  Seven and a half hours later. Just after two in the morning, but it might as well have been noon. The sky was cloudless and everything was bathed in its blue light. Maxim sat on the jetty, back to the sea, facing inland – on a wooden crate full of coiled rope they must have used to secure the boats.

  He was trying to keep his mind off the whimpering noise the girl was making, but without much success. He knew exactly what she was going through. He’d been there. He could feel it. If he looked down at her there was a good chance he would start crying, shaking, because he remembered what it was like, because he would pity her.

  It had happened before. He knew how his heart could take over. Watching people afraid, suffering – he couldn’t control his emotions any more. Not easily. He couldn’t stop the pity, couldn’t stop putting himself in their place – or imagining it was Arisha, God forbid. If he looked at the girl his mind would start it all – picturing it was Arisha down there. Was the girl any different to Arisha? Maybe now, yes – because Arisha had never been through anything like this. In a weird way, this girl was closer to him than Arisha could ever be. She knew the value of those breaths she was taking, heard the beats of her heart as something fragile, the contractions of a mere muscle that could be stopped at any minute. Arisha had never felt that terror. Now this girl knew what he knew. She was like a sister.

  He shook his head. Mad thoughts. He couldn’t let himself think like that. What would happen if he lost it? He had to keep his face straight in front of all these fucking Somali savages. He had to pretend he was in control. He tried to concentrate on the problem, the purely tactical problem. There was too much light from the moon. In the open he would be fully visible. His past was littered with the memories of what a full moon could do. A full moon brought fear, something instinctive gnawing at his gut, no matter what the circumstances. Ninety-eight per cent of the time darkness protected you – the darker it was, the more comfortable he was. But maybe all that didn’t much matter. Not here, not now. This wasn’t Grozny. There wasn’t a real threat here. Nothing he couldn’t deal with, if he kept his head, kept himself hard, unmoved. But the girl kept making that pathetic noise. It kept dragging him back. He needed her to shut up.

  The jetty he was on was about forty feet long, and wider than he remembered it. He was about one hundred and twenty yards from a one-storey, whitewashed building that he knew housed the servants – ‘staff’, they called them. This building had not existed when he had last been here, twenty-two years ago. Back then there had been only the big old house at the end of the pathway up from the dock. The new building straddled the pathway at the exact spot Liz Wellbeck had collapsed to the ground in front of him, a dead baby in her arms. He had been a different man then – not a man, even – a twenty-one-year-old child. He hadn’t felt much about that baby dying, but it had come back to haunt him since, worming into his conscience as he had got older, as he had learned.

  The old house was still there. He could see its black shape rising behind the servants’ quarters, all the windows shuttered or curtained, no lights showing. A little to the side of it there was another new building, long and low, with a flat roof and skylights – the lab – and adjoining it the area where they kept the animals they were working on, a fenced area with mesh pens. Right now, he knew, the pens were all empty.

  He had learned nearly everything from one of the security staff. There were four of them, and he had been warned that their boss – Jean-Marc Forestier – would not be so easy to buy, so he hadn’t tried. The other three had proved willing, though. He had left Steiner with them. Steiner – a corrupt policeman from Mahe, who personally knew the security staff – was the only one of the present crew he could half trust, and so he was using him as a deputy. He would have to deal with Forestier himself, as a priority. He wasn’t looking forward to that. According to the information, Forestier had a room in the main house. It faced the path into the jungle, at the side, obscured from view now by the servants’ quarters. But Maxim knew there was a light on there, and that Forestier wasn’t yet asleep, so he had one of the Somalis up in the treeline watching it, waiting for the light to be switched off. Forestier had a variety of weapons, so would have to be handled carefully, preferably when he was asleep. Maxim could wait another couple of hours for that to happen.

  In the main house there was only Forestier, the Eaton girl, a woman called Mailot, who worked in the lab. All the rest were in the building right in front of him now, except the pretty little black servant girl who had inexplicably come out half an hour ago, the one whining down below him. She was in the boat, with another of the Somalis holding a gun to her head. Maxim risked a quick glance over the side of the jetty, and could see her panting in the bottom of the boat, her staring, white, animal eyes on the gun. He screwed his face up, hating it. He had used coils of rope from the crate he was now sitting on to tie her, then her own shirt to gag her, so that her chest was exposed. He could see her breasts rising and falling as she struggled to breathe. She was terrified, and had wet herself. The Somali was sitting in the stern just staring at her, like she was a specimen.

  Her appearance in the middle of the night had been an upsetting complication, reminding him that he had promised the Somalis they could do what they liked with the women here. That had been a lie. He didn’t want them acting like animals. He wanted to do what he had come here to do then get out. If possible, he wanted no deaths at all. He loathed all of it with a visceral feeling, right in the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t handle it any more.

  Ten years ago his life had been turned on its head in the classroom of a burned-out school on the outskirts of Grozny. Age thirty-three, he had rejoined the 466th Infantry as a volunteer, on a contract, starting at sergeant
– and he had walked into the Second Chechen War with eyes wide open, having already been there for the first conflict, five years earlier. But preparation was nothing. A stupid set of errors had resulted in him being wounded and captured, along with half his section.

  They had been kept in the basement of a hospital first – five of them – then moved to a wrecked school. The school was closer to the front line – within hearing of the Russian troops – so at night the mutilations had started. Before this he had only heard about it – one of those rumours of brutality which were attributed to both sides, and which he had never quite believed.

  But that night Maxim had watched the Chechens cut off fingers, ears, noses, lips, taking turns to do the hacking while four or five held the victim down. They did it in an abandoned classroom, where Chechen kids had once sat at desks and learned about the solar system (there was a torn wall chart showing the stars and planets). All the windows were smashed out by shelling, so that the screams carried clearly across the open ground to where the Russians were sleeping. There was a purpose to it, Maxim realised – to frighten the enemy – but that couldn’t account for the laughter. The Chechens were a mix of ages, but they shared a common sense of humour. They laughed genuinely, loudly, as if watching slapstick on TV. Eighteen-year-old Russian kids writhed in terror on the floor, blood welling from their hacked joints, and the Chechens stood and pointed and laughed until there were tears in their eyes. At some point one of them brought in a dog and it started to eat something they had cut off a scrawny little kid called Sergei, who had only been in Maxim’s section seven days. Sergei had cried and convulsed on the floor, the knowledge of his death etched into his gaping, innocent, little-boy eyes, while the dog had eaten his severed fingers. One of the older Chechens had to actually crouch down, doubled up – he was laughing so much it gave him a stitch.

  They moved on to castration afterwards, two holding the legs apart by sitting on them, cutting crudely with their bayonets, throwing the parts to the dogs, now that the idea had caught on. And they still giggled and laughed, or sat in a corner and smoked and watched. Maxim thought he had seen everything, thought he could not be taught, but that classroom had given him his final lesson. Before they even got to him he was permanently changed. Now usually, when he was alone, thinking, even when his eyes were dry and he looked normal, it felt like he was crying all the time, inside – secretly, silently crying.