The Vanishing (37 page)

He stepped off the ladder and felt his feet go under. He started to drag himself towards the planks, wrenching his feet out of the mire. By the time he was behind them he was in it up to his knees, but could still get his legs clear. He was only a couple of feet away from them when he yelled at the top of his voice. Eaton turned, his mud-streaked face wide with surprise. Tom’s arm was pulled back, ready to throw the half-brick. In a split second he took in the miserable, sad brutality of it all. A woman fighting for her life in stagnant mud, someone stronger trying to hold her under, trying to kill her. He let his arm snap forwards. It happened very quickly – the stone curling through the air, Eaton ducking and turning, but not fast enough. The brick hit the side of his head with a soft crack. He fell immediately.

Tom waited momentarily, to see if he would get up, try again. But the man was flat out, his face in the mud, motionless. Tom lurched towards the planking. Sara was thrashing around on the surface, completely trapped. ‘I’m coming,’ he gasped, breathless. ‘I’m coming.’ He got to the planks, grabbed one, stepped back to her, but suddenly sank lower, up to his waist, in one gulping movement. The stuff was pressing around him, freezing cold. How deep was it? He couldn’t feel the bottom. Sara had her arms out of it now, her head clear. She saw him as if for the first time and started begging him to help.

But he couldn’t get any closer. He was stuck. He pushed the plank over to her, squeezing it under her arm, then reached back for another one. It was farther away. He had to lean out across the mud to get it, and felt himself sinking deeper. He twisted on the mud and threw it towards her. It actually hit her shoulder. ‘Put it under your arm,’ he shouted. It was absurd. Already he could hardly move. What was he going to do now?

She got it under her other arm. That would hold her, but for how long? Her eyes looked wild, insane. She was coughing and spluttering.

He only remembered Eaton as he turned back to get another plank. The man was still face down in the mud, arms splayed, sinking very slowly. For the first time it occurred to Tom what that meant. But he couldn’t do anything about it. He was out of energy, out of range. He couldn’t even do anything for himself. His eyes kept rolling up, his vision clouding. Sara started to shout something at him. He collapsed backwards into the mud, sitting in it, his legs already underneath. He didn’t think he could do anything else. It was over. Whatever happened, it was over.

He had a hard head, one of the doctors said. It was a joke, maybe – maybe not. He could remember the doctor leaning over him and saying that, after another round of CAT scans and X-rays. He could remember the doctor’s face, how cheerful she had looked, how young. At the time he had been crushed beneath the worst headache he had ever experienced, flat out on a hospital trolley, moaning to himself, suffering extreme nausea – but he could recall her talking very calmly to him, as if everything were normal.

Other details were vague. When he had first come round, still in the mud, with his father tugging at him, he had been completely bewildered, with no recollection at all of where he was or how he had got there. Other men were pulling Sara out – and he saw her, and remembered who she was – but he had no idea how they had ended up drowning in mud.

Over the last week most of it had come back in fits and starts, but there were still gaps. He could remember standing on top of the containers, for instance, but not how he got down from there, or what had happened in between. A different doctor had assured him it was all ‘routine’, that he shouldn’t fret about it – he might never remember some things. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t lucky.

They said he had suffered multiple impact lesions, but nothing they would classify as worse than concussion. No skull fractures. No subdural haematoma extensive enough to require immediate surgical intervention – observation had been necessary, though, and repeat scans, hence the long stay. So maybe that did mean he had a hard head.

Now, seven days after the events, the headaches had finally eased and he could see properly. But it had taken a whole week to get there. For the first few days he really had been sick – unable to eat without throwing up, unable to stand straight. A nurse had taken him on toilet trips. It was Saturday before all that had stopped. He had to count the days off on his fingers to be sure. There was a lingering confusion about time. Now, finally – Wednesday, was it? – he was sitting on the edge of the bed, fully clothed, waiting for his father to sort out the admin, then take him home.

Jamie was sitting next to him. He had come with his grandfather, though on Sunday it had been Tom’s mother who had brought him. She had travelled up from Devon and stayed two days, during which period there had been a couple of awkward visits with both his dad and mother present at the same time. It was the third time he had seen Jamie since coming here. ‘Here’, he had learned, was Guy’s – he had been admitted here via its A&E department, brought there by ambulance. He couldn’t recall any of that. Even Jamie’s first visit was unclear. When had it been? Maybe Friday, when he was still quite confused. Sally had been with them, sitting at the edge of the bed with a permanent scowl on her face, tutting her disapproval between sarcastic comments. No love lost there, then.

There had been unpleasant visits from police officers too. One snide DI had sat at his bedside and spoken for what seemed like hours about how dangerous he was. There was a massive international murder inquiry under way and his position in it was far from determined. He had killed Frederick Eaton, maybe other people. That’s what they said. Eaton had been dead before his face hit the mud, according to the autopsy. There was none of it in his lungs or throat. So Tom had killed him, with a simple brick to the head. He had taken multiple blows to his own head, and survived practically unscathed. But one lucky shot with a half-brick had switched Eaton off, just like that. Tom felt peculiarly untouched by that fact – at the moment.

Maxim Sidurov was dead too. It had taken him longer to die, from blood loss and shock, down in the rathole, half his face taken off by Eaton’s first shot. Except there had been a suggestion that Tom might have fired that shot. A female DS said they would have charged him already, if it hadn’t been for pressure from his father. Tom couldn’t believe that was true. In his experience, nothing stopped the cogs of a homicide inquiry. But it had been on Thursday they had said all these things, when nothing had been clear, his brain scrambled. They’d tried to get what they could out of him before the doctors kicked them out. Fair enough. Since then, he knew, they had taken long statements from Sara and his father, and no one had returned to accuse him.

Now, Wednesday morning, he had spent the last half-hour talking to Jamie, hearing an account of his holiday in Ibiza, or wherever it had been. There were a lot of snorkelling stories, not many references to Sally. Jamie knew the diplomacy already. If she had been with another guy Jamie didn’t mention him, and Tom didn’t ask. He sat with his arm round his son and listened in a kind of dopey, dreamy state. He wasn’t taking anything but painkillers now, but he still tired quickly if he had to concentrate. It was a huge relief to see Jamie again, to hear his voice, to mark the irritating turns of phrase picked up from American movies and computer games. Normal life. Someone he loved, who loved him.

His phone buzzed and he looked at the number. Sara. She had called him at least twice a day for the last four days. He hadn’t really been up to speaking to her at first, so had just listened for as long as he could, the phone pressed to his ear. But the conversations were lengthening now he was getting back to normal. Last night they had spoken for three hours.

It wasn’t what Tom had expected. When her number had first come up while he was lying here alone, head pounding, the first night in this place, his heart had skipped like he was a teenager all over again.

She spoke to him for a few seconds only, from where she was sitting, halfway across London, in a waiting room in New Charing Cross Hospital, in Hammersmith. She told him where she was, what she was doing, then listened to his response. Calling him was like holding his hand. It calmed her. And she needed calming. She ended the call, took a breath.

She was in a part of the paediatric department, her eyes on the corridor full of little doors that led to consulting rooms. The room was full, full of parents with worried faces, kids who were sick of waiting. There was a little play area off to one side, with three or four kids making quite a bit of noise there. So far, no one had said anything to her – such as ‘
Why are you here? Where’s
your
child?
’ Nor had anyone asked who the guy at the door was – tall, smart, discreet, with an earpiece; one of a retinue of security personnel and assistants that she was becoming increasingly irritated with.

They were all over her now, all the people her mother – Liz Wellbeck (she could not stop thinking of her as her mother) – had also loathed. The PAs and advisers and security managers. Necessary, she knew that. She was more like a business now, a living, walking conglomerate of global assets, at the peak of an entity that kept over a hundred thousand people in direct employment. She didn’t want anything to do with it. She still had to think it all through, work out if she had any options. Her birthday had brought it all to her, all Liz’s property, more than she had even guessed existed. Liz Wellbeck – a woman who had wanted
her
, and not Freddie Eaton, to control it all – a woman who had tricked her into thinking she was her mother. But that had been nothing compared to her father. Except he wasn’t her father.
Freddie Eaton.
She had to start thinking of him like that, as something detached from her. A name. Not her father at all.
Freddie Eaton
had tried to kill her, to drown her in mud. For money. She closed her eyes and had an image of Tom, diving into him as he tried to shoot at her, then later throwing the brick that had stopped it all. He had saved her life.

She took a breath, tried to get her head clear of it all, to focus on the reason she was here instead. Part of why she felt so desperate at the moment, so completely unable to hold it together, was because there was just too much to deal with, to try to assimilate.

She shouldn’t have come here at all, of course. Would this do any good? The assistants had told her that this was where the woman worked. That was why she was here. One of them had come in here earlier and had somehow or other found out that she was here right now, in Cubicle 3, working. So far she hadn’t emerged to call out the name of the next patient. But she was going to, any minute now.

She bent forward and tried not to cry again. Every time she thought about what had happened she wanted to cry. She felt stupid, dirty, violated. She wasn’t even the age she had always thought she was. She was two years older. Where had those two years gone? Lost somewhere in her blurred childhood, on the Ile des Singes Noirs. She had passed her first years there as a kind of infant recluse, isolated from the world. Just her and her mother. Now she knew why. Her entire life had been a disgusting deception. And two of the monsters behind it all had been her parents.
Elizabeth Wellbeck. Freddie Eaton.

They were not her real parents. That was why she was here. She dug her hand in the pocket of the long cashmere cardigan she was wearing and unfolded the sheets of paper she had there. John Lomax – Tom’s father – had spent a long time talking to her about a case, a child who had vanished in 1990. That had been on Saturday. She had agreed to a doctor from his inquiry taking a blood sample from her, for the purpose of running DNA tests. They had promised to expedite the results. They were comparing her DNA to Freddie Eaton’s, and to the DNA held from John Lomax’s old inquiry, the DNA of the missing girl’s mother. She was still waiting for the results of that, but didn’t really need to. Not now. Because on Sunday this letter had arrived.

A letter from Liz, another of her near-illegible missives, this time from the grave. It had been in a safety deposit box in Switzerland for over ten years. It was different to anything else Liz had written in that it had been composed over ten years ago, when she had first been diagnosed with her cancer, before she had changed. Only Felice Cotte, Sara’s old nanny, had known about this letter. But she knew nothing of the contents, and had promised absolute secrecy as to the letter’s existence, and kept that promise. Her responsibility had been to deliver it when Liz was dead. And she had done that. On Sunday. At least arranged it, in accordance with Liz’s wishes of ten years previously, her fingers and commands reaching out even from her grave.

Except she wasn’t in her grave any longer. Her body had been exhumed. It was in some police morgue somewhere in Paris. They needed to do an autopsy, to find out if she had been poisoned. That was what Sara’s new principal PA was calling ‘the Belgian inquiry’. It was hard to keep track of how many inquiries there were. A document had been found on the body of the man Tom and she had surprised at Alison Spencer’s place, the man who had run and fallen off the roof, Stefan Meyer. A communication from Liz to Alison. Sara didn’t know the contents – no one had told her – but they had led to Hulpe – her cancer consultant – being arrested in Brussels, and Liz’s corpse being unceremoniously dug up. The suspicion was that Freddie Eaton and Hulpe had killed her off. Because Freddie knew what Sara had never known. He knew that on her birthday everything was coming to her – a woman who wasn’t even his daughter – and he was getting nothing.

‘Madeleine?’

Sara looked up. The door was open and the doctor had come out, standing there in a white coat and flat shoes, a clipboard in hand, a stethoscope hung around her neck. ‘Madeleine?’ she asked again. Nearer to her a mother turned and started to get up, holding the hand of a little girl sitting beside her. Sara watched with her heart in her throat, her breathing stopped, as the doctor stepped forward, smiling, and greeted the little girl.