The Vanishing (18 page)

‘It’s Alison,’ she said. ‘Something terrible is going on. They’ve killed her …’

He started to speak to the woman, quietly, but insistently, seeing if he could get her back to consciousness. ‘Alison! Can you hear me? My name’s Tom Lomax. I’m here with Sara Eaton. We’re here to help you. Can you hear me, Alison? You’re going to be all right. We’ll call an ambulance. You’ll be OK. Nod if you can hear what I’m saying …’ As he spoke he started checking her body for any obvious injuries, all the while his ears focusing on the room around him. He kept glancing back over his shoulder at the door they had come through. There was another opposite. Whoever had been here might still be here. ‘Does she understand English?’ he asked. Sara mumbled that she
was
English. He couldn’t see any injuries, but couldn’t check beneath her. He didn’t want to move her. She might have a spinal injury. There was no blood anywhere. ‘Maybe she had a heart attack,’ he said. ‘I can’t find any injuries.’ There was no bruising on her head. ‘You’re OK, Alison,’ he said again. He told Sara to use her mobile, call the emergency services. He didn’t know the number. She managed to get her phone out. He didn’t think it through – consider what they would tell the police or doctors – because all the planning was redundant now. They had to react to this immediately.

Sara was starting to press the buttons, her hands jagging all over, when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He spun quickly and stood, his heart racing. Beside him Sara shrieked at the top of her voice. There was a man in the other doorway, staring at them. He was tall, overweight, with hair that was sticking up on his head, blood streaked across his face. He had on a suit that was crumpled, with something spilled all over the jacket and down the front of the trousers. He moved his hand from his side, revealing what he was holding – a kitchen knife. The blade was about twelve inches long. He stepped forward, his eyes moving from Sara to Tom. She screamed again, so loud it hurt Tom’s ears. Tom was frozen to the spot, trying to work out what to do. The man was heavy, bigger than him, but he looked worried. He didn’t look like a burglar. More like one of Alison Spencer’s staff. Tom let out a breath. That could be it. Maybe he thought
they
were the burglars. He opened his mouth to speak but then Sara screamed for the third time. The look in the man’s eyes changed suddenly. His eyes went to the body on the floor, then back up to Tom. Instantly, Tom saw the truth: the man wasn’t staff, he wasn’t meant to be here at all. Tom took a step forward, towards him. That was enough. Something shifted between them and the expression on the man’s face switched to fear. Suddenly he turned and started to run, back the way he had come.

Tom got hold of Sara. She looked terrified. He had time to ask if she was OK, time to tell her again to call the ambulance and police, then he too turned and started running. ‘I’m going after him,’ he shouted. ‘Wait here. Don’t leave this room.’ He could hear her yelling at him to stop, but he was already through the door, already sprinting.

The man may have looked clumsy and fat, but he was fast enough. Already, through in the next room, he was out of sight. But there was only one door swinging wide open and Tom could hear his footsteps clattering across the wooden floors beyond. He went straight after him, into another room, then down a short corridor on the other side of that. That brought him to the foot of a winding stairwell. He took the steps two at a time, taking deep breaths and listening up ahead to make sure the man hadn’t stopped and turned to face him. At the first landing he came out into a circular room with desks and chairs. There were papers in heaps, drawers pulled out, books from a bookshelf all over the floor. He stumbled over them and took the next flight more slowly. They had to be ascending one of the towers he had seen. So it was going to be a dead end. The man couldn’t go anywhere. He would have to turn and either fight, or give in. From the look Tom had read in his eyes, and from the desperate speed of his flight, Tom guessed the latter. But the man was armed, so best to assess the options carefully, keep an escape route open.

He shouted up after him, in English, telling him he was police. He repeated the word ‘police’ several times, hoping the lie would have some effect, but he could still hear the guy panting up above. He ran up to the next room, a smaller place with boxes piled in storage. He went straight to the stairs but stopped because he saw now that there were two doors off. He could hear nothing up the stairs, so he backed into the room and approached the other door more cautiously. It led into a long loft space, with the sloping roof down one side, strung with cobwebs and dust, and more crates and stacked furniture at the other. The door right opposite him – forty feet distant – was swinging open. He swore and started to sprint again. He could hear the rain clattering heavily off the roof tiles, inches from his head.

The farther door opened on to another long loft coming off at right angles, but this time the door at the far end was closed. About halfway along, a set of wooden, four-paned windows were hanging open. Over the din from the rainfall, he could hear a scraping, fumbling noise from out on the roof. Tom guessed the door ahead was locked so he’d gone out the window.

He put his head out very cautiously. Staring through the now driving rain, he saw that the man was already quite a distance along a narrow ledge that ran the length of the roof, just above the guttering. He was running in a crouch, arms out to steady himself, the knife still there. Tom shouted at him and saw him flinch, like something had been thrown. But he didn’t pause, didn’t look back. It looked like he knew where he was going.

Tom hauled himself out on to the ledge, balanced with care, then began to trot after him, still shouting at him to stop. He even put it into bad French. The rain was so heavy it would be hard to hear anything, though. The water was already coursing off the tiles, and the ledge was treacherous, worse in those places where the flashing cut into it in strips of slippery zinc. He wasn’t good with heights anyway, so had to stop himself from looking at the drop. It took all his concentration to keep his footwork safe. They were three floors up, and though the floors weren’t high, it was enough to break something even if you landed well.

Twice he saw the man falter and wobble. Tom was going slowly, but he was gaining. He slipped himself when he was only twenty feet from him, a foot going over the edge before he could recover. He went down and grabbed the edge of a wet tile, but it came away in his hand. He dropped to one knee, brought the other leg up, took a breath and got his stance back, then stood to find that the man had for the first time paused to look at him, perhaps hearing that he had stumbled. He shouted something incomprehensible to Tom then turned to continue. He looked very frightened. Tom stood, changed the tile to his left hand, switching his grip so that he had some purchase on it. His hand moved back to throw it. He was less than twenty feet away and the tile was about as heavy as a half-brick. If it hit his head it would seriously injure him. He took a breath, paused, and right then heard the man shout out. He looked up and saw him flailing at the air, his balance gone. Tom stepped forward, yelling at him, telling him to get his hands down. But already the man was going over. Tom was too far away to stop it. He watched as the man managed to catch hold of the guttering. He was poised like that for a split second, shouting something, dangling in mid-air. Tom started to run towards him. He was only feet from him when the gutter broke.

Tom went into a crouch, putting a hand out to steady himself. He heard a muffled thump from below, then silence. He looked over, hoping to see the guy sitting there with a broken ankle maybe – he had dropped in the best possible way, feet first with his fall slowed by his hold on the guttering. But the guy was lying in a crumpled pile, face up.

‘Fuck,’ Tom whispered. ‘Fucking shit.’

He found his way down via the fire escape the man had probably been aiming for. He moved quickly, cursing himself. He had no idea who the man was, no idea if he was the actual burglar. Why had he been chasing him? And besides, what did any of this really have to do with him, with Tom Lomax? He was a fucking idiot.

The man was in exactly the same position when Tom got to him. He was completely still, a pool of blood spreading out beneath his head. He had gone feet first, but clearly he hadn’t landed like that. The head was crushed at the back where it had hit the flagstones, the neck bent at an impossible angle. The eyes were open, staring at him, but there was no sight there. Tom felt a whack in his chest, his heart tripping as he realised what he was seeing. The guy was dead. He bent down and tried to breathe properly. He couldn’t accept it, couldn’t understand that this had happened. He searched with trembling fingers, looking desperately for a pulse, but finding nothing. He listened for a heartbeat, felt for a pulse again, held his ear over the gaping mouth to see if there was breath or warmth. But it was all stupid. The man’s eyes were wide open, rain dropping into them without even a reflex response. Two minutes ago, whoever he was, he had been running, speaking, breathing. But he was gone now. Completely gone.

The rain was coming straight down now, in massive drops, like something tropical. Tom’s clothing was drenched. He gazed up at the broken guttering. It wasn’t even that high. On a good day you could jump from there, roll like a parachutist and walk off.

He remembered Sara, and the other person. He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet to walk back to her, then, on impulse, he stooped again and very gently went through the pockets of the man’s jacket. He found a big brown envelope, a wallet and an ID card. The envelope was soaking wet. It had someone’s name on, but it was smudged with the rain and he couldn’t read it. The ID card was plastic-covered and belonged to Stefan Marc Meyer. He frowned, put the ID card in his pocket to show Sara. Stefan Meyer? Was that the name of the nurse who had been looking after her mother? He swore again.

His eyes scanned the surrounding gardens. There were big trees and dense hedges obscuring the views to other properties, but it was possible someone had seen something. It was possible someone was going to come along and say he had murdered this man, burglar or not. And how could he be a burglar if he was Elizabeth Wellbeck’s nurse?

He turned in a kind of stupor to get back into the house, but saw that Sara was already standing there, only ten feet away from him, the rain streaming over her. Just standing there watching him. He looked away from her, feeling the shame rushing at him. She shouted something, but he couldn’t hear it. He ran a hand over his face, wiping away the rain. He was breathing heavily, and not just because he’d run all the way down.

She came up to him while he was still standing like that, unable to move. He felt her take his hand and he looked at her, his face quivering. There was a strange, wild look in her eyes.

‘He fell,’ he told her. ‘He’s fucking dead.’

‘So what? He killed Alison,’ she said. She was gritting her teeth, forcing the words out. ‘She died while I was talking to her. He killed her.’

He frowned at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s Stefan Meyer,’ she said. ‘I recognised him. Alison said he poisoned her. She told me …’

‘She spoke to you?’

‘She whispered to me. She was whispering, so I had to bend down to hear. She said it was him …’

‘He poisoned her?’

She nodded. ‘She told me that.’

‘Is she alive still? Did you call the police or …’

She shook her head. Then started to cry, softly.

‘Let’s go in,’ he said. ‘I need to check her …’

‘She died right then.’ She screwed her eyes up. ‘She died while I was stroking her hair. She was trying to tell me things. She started convulsing. I couldn’t stop it …’

They went back in and he did it all again, checking for signs of life, going through the motions. When he was finished he stood up and walked back to the doorway, where Sara was standing, head down, still crying.

‘She spoke to you?’ he forced himself to ask, again. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m fucking sure.’

‘What did she say – about the poison, I mean?’ He was trying to get to grips with it, thinking that if the Belgian police arrived any minute now it would make a massive difference to everything if the man out there really had killed this woman. He looked around the floor for anything that might have been used to poison her – a syringe, perhaps – but couldn’t see anything beyond the mess. ‘Did she say anything else about the poison?’ he asked again. How did Alison Spencer know she had been poisoned? There must be a clue. Or maybe the guy told her that. Or she felt the effects. But what would he use to poison her?

He was being cold-blooded, he thought. But there wasn’t time for sympathy and consolation. Not right now. He was in a perilous situation. Or was he? In actual fact he had done nothing wrong at all. The man had slipped and fallen. ‘Sara,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me, please? What did she say – all of it?’ He put a hand on her arm. She looked up at him, her face a mask of twisted grief and shock. ‘She didn’t say anything about how he did it,’ she muttered, the words coming out indistinctly. ‘But she told me something else.’

John Lomax was in his kitchen, just finishing the preparations on a cod and bacon dish he’d first found in a Jamie Oliver book. Only now he hadn’t been able to find the cookbook, so he was going from memory. He was beginning to think he’d forgotten something important. It was meant to be a quick meal for himself and Rachel. She was on lunch break from a shift at New Charing Cross Hospital – only a five-minute walk from his riverside flat, so she wasn’t desperately pressed, but he didn’t want to spend the whole time in the kitchen. Her visit was the high point of today – the only bit he had been looking forward to. He wasn’t rushed at all, of course, because since he’d retired he had nothing to do. Not really. A year and a half ago he’d been looking forward to doing nothing, but now it was driving him mad. He was filling the time with going through the old Grenser files, but there was something desperate about that. And messing around with food wasn’t going to keep him sane.