The Dead Sea Deception (7 page)

You let me know I’m on the right track.

Tillman was nobody. He’d be the first to admit that: more so as he’d gotten older, as he’d moved further and further away from the one time in his life when everything had come into clear focus and – briefly – made a kind of sense.

It was the mystery on which he was nailed up, these days. The hunt was what gave shape and meaning to his life, and so he was defined by an absence: four absences, in fact. The only things that were real for him were the things that weren’t there. Such a long time ago, now. So much blood under the bridge, and more to come, definitely, because the alternative was to stop looking. If he stopped looking, Tillman wouldn’t just be nobody, he’d be nothing, and nowhere. Might as well be dead as admit that he’d never see Rebecca again, or the kids. Never come home, was how he put it to himself; admit, finally, that the world was empty.

It had been different when he was a younger man. Being nobody was the easy option back then. Born in Preston, Lancashire, where he lived until he was sixteen, he grew up with a drifter’s nature and a drifter’s skill set, too lazy to be dangerous or even effective. He wandered into things, wandered out of them again, cared about nothing.

At school, Tillman had been good at most subjects, the academic stuff as well as workshops and sports, but was too
uncommitted to any one thing to turn
good
into
great
. Good came without effort, and it was enough. Consequently, he dropped out at sixteen, despite earnest interventions from his teachers, and took a job at a garage that paid sufficiently well to supply a lifestyle of casual vices – drinking, women, occasional gambling – indulged without all that much conviction.

Eventually, though, and maybe inevitably, he’d drifted out of his accustomed orbit. He became part of a generational exodus from the north of England to the south, where there just seemed to be more going on. It wasn’t even a decision, really: in the decades after the Second World War, Lancashire’s mills and factories had foundered like so many torpedoed trawlers, and the waves thrown up by their collapse had pushed a million people to the opposite end of the country. In London, Tillman had done a lot of things, been ambitious in none of them: a strong man whose strengths were hidden from him. Garage mechanic, plasterer, roofer, security guard, joiner. Jobs that required skills, certainly, and Tillman seemed to acquire those skills very readily. What he didn’t do was to stick to any one path for long enough to find out what he was underneath those quotidian disguises.

Perhaps, in retrospect, it ought to have been obvious that a man like that would find his centre of gravity in a woman. When he met Rebecca Kelly, at an after-hours lock-in party given by one of his former bosses in an east London pub, he was twenty-four and she was a year younger. She looked out of place against dark-pink flock wallpaper, but she was so extraordinary that she probably would have looked out of place anywhere.

She wore no make-up, and she didn’t need any: her brown eyes contained all colours and her pale skin made her lips look redder than any lipstick could make them. Her hair was like the hair described in the
Song of Solomon
, which Tillman vaguely remembered from a religious studies lesson: clusters of black
grapes. Her stillness was like the stillness of a dancer waiting for the overture to start.

Tillman had never encountered beauty so perfect, or passion so intense. He’d never encountered a virgin, either, so their first night of lovemaking was unexpectedly traumatic for both of them. Rebecca had wept, sitting amid the bloodied sheets with her head buried in her folded arms, and Leo had been terrified that he had injured her in some profound and irrevocable way. Then she embraced him, kissed him fiercely, and they tried again and made it work.

They were engaged three weeks later, and married a month after that in a registry office in Enfield. Photos from that time invariably showed Tillman with his arm protectively around his wife’s waist, his smile tinged with the solemnity of a man carrying something precious and fragile.

Work had never been entirely real for him. He prospered without effort, meandered without a tether. Clearly, though, love was real: marriage was real. Tillman’s life had folded inward on another’s life, to make a focus where none had been.

Happiness was something he’d never missed because he believed he already had it. Now he understood the difference, and accepted the stark miracle of Rebecca’s love with uneasy wonder. There was nothing you could do to deserve a gift like that, so on some level you always half-expected the boom to drop and the gift to be snatched away.

Instead, the children had come along, and the simple miracle had become a complex one. Jud. Seth. Grace. The names had a biblical ring. Tillman had never read the Bible, but he knew that there was a garden in it, before the Devil showed up and the shit hit the fan. He felt as though he were living there: for six years he felt that.

Part of being happy was that he’d learned to focus his skills
and his intellect. He’d set up his own company, selling central heating systems, and he was doing pretty well – well enough to rent a warehouse with a small office attached, and take on a secretary. He worked six days a week, but didn’t stay late unless there was an emergency. He always wanted to be there to help Rebecca put the kids to bed, even though she never allowed him to read them bedtime stories. It was the one thing about her that he didn’t understand. She had a horror of stories, never read fiction herself, and shut him down within a sentence if he ever ventured on a ‘Once upon a time’.

She was a mystery, he had to admit that. He’d explained himself to her in a dozen sentences or so, without the aid of diagrams, but Rebecca was reticent about her past, even more so about her family. She only said that they were very close, and very inward-looking: ‘We were everything to each other.’ She became quiet when she said these things, and Tillman suspected some tragedy that he was too afraid to probe.

Had he married a picture? A façade? He knew so little. But you could know nothing about gravity and still remain fastened to the earth. He was fastened to her, and to the children, that tightly. Gentle, nervous Jud; boisterous, crude Seth; furious, loving Grace. Rebecca, against whom adjectives leaned askew because there was no way to describe her. If he needed to know anything more, she’d tell him. And whether she told him or not, gravity would still operate.

One evening in September, when the summer had stopped as suddenly as a car crash and the trees were burning bright red and yellow, Tillman came home, not one minute later than usual, to find the house empty. Completely empty. Jud was five, and had just started school, so he thought at first that maybe he’d got the date mixed up and missed a parents’ evening. Contrite, he checked the calendar.

Nothing.

Then he checked the bedrooms and his contrition turned to abject terror. Rebecca’s side of the wardrobe was empty. In the bathroom, the vanity unit was bare and his toothbrush stood alone in a purple plastic mug that bore the face of Barney the Dinosaur. The children’s rooms had been even more thoroughly stripped: clothes and toys, sheets and duvets, posters and friezes and pinned-up kindergarten paintings, everything had gone.

Almost everything. One of Grace’s toys – Mr Snow, a unicorn who smelled of vanilla essence – had fallen behind the sofa and been forgotten.

Then he found the note, in Rebecca’s handwriting, consisting of four words.

Don’t look for us
.

She hadn’t even signed it.

Tillman was walking wounded, working through the shock of what felt like an amputation. He called the police, who told him he should just wait. You didn’t become a missing person by walking out of the house: time has to elapse before you can be awarded that status. Tillman could maybe call around his wife’s friends and family, the desk sergeant suggested, and see if she was with anyone she knew. If the kids didn’t show up for school the next day, then Tillman should call again. Until then, it was much more likely that the whole family were safe and well somewhere close by than that they’d been abducted en masse. Particularly since there was a note.

Rebecca didn’t have any friends, that Tillman knew of, and he had no idea where her family lived, if they were still alive at all. These options were closed to him. All he could do was walk the streets on the very remote off-chance that he might run into her. He walked, even though he already knew it was an empty hope. Rebecca and the children were far away by this time; the
purpose of the note was to make sure that he didn’t follow or to persuade him – as if that were even possible – that they’d left of their own accord.

They hadn’t. That was his starting point. As he stalked the streets of Kilburn like an automaton, he replayed the events of the day again and again: the children kissing him goodbye, with as much spontaneity and love as usual; Rebecca telling him the car might be in the garage for its MOT, so if he needed a lift home she probably wouldn’t be able to pick him up (he called the garage and checked: Rebecca had driven the car in at noon, asked them to replace the spare tyre at the same time, and arranged to pick it up the following morning unless it failed its test). Even the contents of the fridge were a speaking testimony: she’d stocked up for the week, presumably in the morning before dropping the car off.

So the note had been written under duress – a prospect that he had to force his mind away from immediately because the dangerous rage it evoked threatened to tear its way out of him in some crazy way.

The police had been no more helpful the next morning. The note, they explained, made it very clear that Mrs Tillman had left him of her own volition and taken the children with her because she no longer trusted him with them.

‘Was there some marital dispute the night before?’ the desk officer asked him. He could see naked dislike in her eyes: of course there was a dispute, that look said. Women leave their husbands all the time, but they don’t up and run with three kids unless there’s something seriously wrong.

There was nothing, Tillman said, and kept on saying, but the same question surfaced again and again, accompanied each time by an absolute refusal to list Rebecca as a missing person. The kids, yes: school-age and pre-school-age children can’t be
allowed to just disappear. Descriptions were taken and photofits put together. The kids would be looked for, Tillman was told. But when found, they would not be taken from their mother, and the police would not necessarily cooperate in putting Tillman and his wife back in contact with each other. That would depend on the story Rebecca told and the wishes she expressed.

At some point in this vicious circle of patronising indifference and bald suspicion, Tillman lost control. He spent a night in the cells, having had to be wrestled away from an impossibly young constable, screaming obscenities, after the little rodent asked him if Rebecca had been having an affair. It was fortunate that he hadn’t got his hands around the kid’s throat: he’d certainly been about to.

As far as Tillman could tell, there was never any real investigation. He got progress reports, at odd intervals; sightings, which according to the Met were always followed up but always turned out to be false alarms; sporadic news articles, which seemed at one point to be building into some kind of conspiracy theory in which he’d murdered his wife and kids or else murdered his wife and sold his kids to Belgian paedophiles. But that kind of phenomenon has to have something to feed on, and since there was no news after the first day, it petered out without reaching critical mass.

Tillman contemplated the ruin of his life. He might have gone back to work, tried to forget, but he never seriously considered it an option. To forget would be to leave Rebecca, and their children, in the hands of strangers whose agenda he couldn’t even begin to guess at. If they hadn’t gone willingly, and he knew they hadn’t, then they’d been taken, from a populous city without so much as a trace. And they were waiting now to be rescued. They were waiting for him.

The problem with this, as Tillman was intelligent enough to appreciate, was that he wasn’t even close to being the man they needed: the man who could find and free his family from the hands of their captors. He didn’t even know where to start.

Sitting in the kitchen of their home, a week after the disappearance, he thought it out with ruthless and clear-headed logic. What needed to be done could not be done by him and could not be trusted to anyone else.

He had to change. He had to become the man who could find and fight and liberate and do whatever else was required to restore equilibrium to the world. The resources he had at his disposal were fourteen hundred pounds’ worth of savings and a mind that had never yet been tested to its limits.

He took Rebecca’s note from his pocket.
Don’t look for us
. For the thousandth time he read those words, for surface and then for hidden meanings. Maybe, but only maybe, the space after the first word was wider than the other spaces: Rebecca’s yearning for him projected into that minuscule void, begging him to see what her heart was really shrieking as her hand wrote.

Don’t

look for us
.

I’m coming, he told her in his mind, his hand balling into a fist. It won’t be soon, but I’m coming. And the people who took you away from me are going to bleed and burn and die.

The next day he joined the army – the 45th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery – and began, methodically, to rebuild himself.