Vanished - By Tim Weaver
PART ONE
1
12 June
Her office was on the top floor of a red-brick four-storey building just off Shaftesbury Avenue. The other floors belonged to an advertising agency and a big international media company. Two code-locked glass doors protected sharp-suited executives from the outside world, while a security guard the size of a wrestler watched from inside. Everything else in the street was either dead or dying. Two empty stores, one a shoe shop, one an antiques dealer, had long since gone. Adjacent to that was a boarded-up Italian restaurant with a huge NOW CLOSED sign in the window. The last man standing was a video rental store that looked like it was on its way out: two men were arguing in an empty room with only a single DVD rack and some faded film posters for company.
It was a warm June evening. The sun had been out all day, although somewhere out of sight it felt like rain might be lying in wait. I’d brought a jacket, just in case, but for the moment I was in a black button-up shirt, denims and a pair of black leather shoes I’d bought in Italy. They were the genuine article, from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, but I didn’t wear them much; mostly their purpose in life was to cut my feet to shreds. Yet they were a sacrifice worth making for the woman I was meeting.
Liz emerged from one of the elevators in the foyer about fifteen minutes later. People had been filing out of the building steadily since five, but the office she worked in was also the office she ran, so she tended to be the last one out. She spotted me immediately, standing in the doorway of the now-defunct antiques shop, and I was struck by how beautiful she looked: dark eyes flashing as she smiled, long, chocolate hair pulled back from a face full of natural angles. Elizabeth Feeny, solicitor advocate, had thrived in a city packed with dominant males: she’d gone up against bigger fish and won; she’d taken their clients and retained them; she’d brought together a team of formidable lawyers under the umbrella of Feeny & Company and she’d fronted a number of high-profile cases that had secured her growing reputation. It would have been difficult not to be impressed by her, even if I hadn’t been seeing her for eight months and living next door to her for a lot longer. She completely looked the part, moving across the road towards me in a white blouse and black pencil skirt that traced the gentle curves of her body. But her biggest asset was that when she smiled, she made you feel like the only person in the room. That was a useful skill when you were pacing the floor of a court.
‘Mr Raker,’ she said, and kissed me.
‘Elizabeth.’
She gave me a gentle slap – she hated being called Elizabeth – and I brought her into me and kissed her on the top of the head. ‘How was your day?’ I asked.
‘Full of meetings.’
We stayed like that for a moment. This was new for both of us. It had been two and a half years since my wife Derryn had died of breast cancer, and almost sixteen since we’d first met. Liz was married at twenty-one, pregnant six months later and divorced shortly after that. She spent two years bringing up her daughter Katie, before returning to the law degree she’d started and completing her training as a solicitor. She hadn’t dated seriously since before she’d married her husband.
‘Where are we eating?’ she asked.
‘There’s an Italian place I know.’ I shifted us – still together – around to face the closed restaurant just down from where we were standing.
She squeezed me. ‘You’re a funny man, Raker.’
‘I booked us a table at a South African place just off Covent Garden. We can get drunk on Castle Lager.’
‘South African?’
‘Ever had babotie?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
We started walking slowly. ‘Well, tonight’s your lucky night.’
The restaurant was in a narrow cellar in a side street between Covent Garden market and the Strand. The stone walls had holes carved in them, framed photographs of South Africa sitting inside. In the one closest to us, the Ferris wheel at Gold Reef City was caught in black and white, frozen for a moment against a markless sky. I’d spent a lot of time in and around Johannesburg in my previous life as a journalist, and been stationed there for a year in the run-up to the elections in 1994. It had been a different place back then, more like a war zone than a city, its people massaged by hatred and fear.
Liz let me choose, so I ordered two bottles of Castle, peri-peri chicken to start and babotie – spiced mincemeat, baked with egg – for the main course. While we waited for the food to arrive, she talked about her day and I told her a little of mine. I’d just put a case to bed a couple of days before: a seventeen-year-old runaway who’d been hiding out close to Blackfriars Bridge. His parents, a couple from a sprawling council estate in Hackney, had told me that they only had enough money to cover my search for three days. It took me five to find him, the job complicated by the fact that he had no friends, talked to pretty much no one, and, when he’d left, had literally taken only the clothes on his back. No phone. No cards. No money. Nothing even remotely traceable. I’d been to see his mum and dad and told them to pay me for the three days, and then return when they felt they could afford to square up the extra two. They were good people, but I wouldn’t see them again. I wasn’t normally in the business of charity, but I found it even more difficult to leave things unfinished.
After the babotie arrived, conversation moved on from work to Liz’s daughter and the university course she was doing. She was finishing the final year of an economics degree. I hadn’t had the chance to meet her yet, but from the way Liz had described her, and the photos I’d seen, she appeared to be almost a mirror image of her mother.
I ordered two more bottles of Castle and, as Liz continued talking, caught sight of a woman watching me from across the restaurant. As soon as we made eye contact she looked down at her food. I watched for a moment, waiting for her eyes to drift up to me a second time, but she just continued staring at her plate, picking apart a steak. I turned back to Liz. Ten seconds later, the woman was looking at me again.
She was in her late twenties, red hair curling as it hit her shoulders, freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose. She had a kind of understated beauty, as if she didn’t realize it, or she did but wasn’t bothered enough to do anything about it. The thin fingers of her right hand grasped a fork; those on her left were wrapped around the neck of a wine glass. She was wearing a wedding ring.
‘You okay?’
The woman was looking away again now, and Liz had noticed me staring at her. ‘The woman in the corner there – do you know her?’
Liz looked back over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘She keeps looking this way.’
‘Can’t say I blame her,’ Liz said, smiling. ‘You’re a good-looking man, Raker. Not that I want to inflate your ego or anything.’
We carried on eating. A couple of times I glanced in the woman’s direction, but didn’t catch her eye again. Then, about thirty minutes later, she suddenly wasn’t there any more. Where she’d been sitting was empty; just a half-finished steak and a full glass of wine. Money sat on a white tray on the edge of the table, the bill underneath it.
She was gone.