23
By the time I got back to the car, I had a name: Adrian Wellis. There had been just one call in the entire year and a half I had records for: 5 August, just as Ursula had described. The call lasted eight seconds, which presumably meant he’d dialled in, got voicemail and then hung up. Sam never phoned back; Wellis never tried again. And yet, in order for Ursula to read his name on the display, Sam must have put Wellis into his address book. So why would Sam go to that kind of trouble for a person he was never going to ring?
As Spike had done with all the other numbers, he’d managed to source a street address off the back of the call. Tierston Road, Peckham. It was only five miles from Canary Wharf, which meant I could have been down there inside thirty minutes, barring traffic jams. But heading down now meant heading in blind.
Liz had once said to me that the reason I did what I did, the reason I put my life at risk for the missing, was because I was trying to plug holes in the world that couldn’t be filled; trying to prevent other people from feeling the way I had. She meant Derryn. She meant her death, and everything – all the grief and anger – that came after. I understood that, saw the truth in it, even told her – and maybe believed – that I could control that part of me and become a different person. Not detached exactly, but not so affected by the people I found either. When you became affected by them, by their stories, by the people they’d lost, you took risks: you stepped into the dark, not knowing what was there – and the only armour you took into battle was the debt you felt to the families.
I knew Liz was right and, for a time, I’d resisted the temptation to stray back into the shadows. I stayed rooted to the right side of the dividing line, taking the cases, working them and closing them off, then leaving them alone. But it couldn’t be like that for ever. Seeing through my commitment to the lost, to their families – however I did it and whatever it took – was who I was. It was woven into me. When Derryn died, a little part of me went too – and the space she left behind was never filled; only replaced, temporarily, by the people I returned to the light. I wanted to be with Liz, wanted to be in her life. But she’d never fully understood that part of me.
That was the fault line in our relationship.
And, ultimately, maybe the force that would tear us apart.
Adrian Wellis lived in a tatty two-storey red-brick terrace house with a concrete garden and sheets for curtains. Behind it was a sink estate called The Firs: a monolithic series of concrete blocks, housing almost ten thousand people.
Outside it was still hot and airless: clouds didn’t move in the sky, leaves didn’t move in the trees, just the faint shimmer of a heat haze coming off the tarmac. All along the road, windows were open, but at Wellis’s gate there was a strange, eerie kind of silence to the place. No music. No kids. Only the distant sound of cars on the Old Kent Road and the occasional squawk of a bird. The doorbell didn’t work, so I knocked a couple of times.
No answer.
There were two mottled glass panels in the door. Inside was a hallway with three doors off it. Stairs off to the right. Close to the door was a light bulb with no lampshade.
I knocked again and waited.
The front garden was a mess; only a garden in name. Everything had been paved over and left to decay. The slabs were uneven, weeds crawling through the gaps between them. Four big concrete blocks were in a pile at the end of the driveway. On top was a flowerpot, no flowers in it, just earth.
When there was no answer for a second time, I headed out, down to the end of the road, and around to the back of the houses. Every home had a six-foot-high fence marked with a number. Wellis’s had been painted on, the paint running the full length of the gate and collecting in a pool on the step at the bottom. He’d never bothered cleaning it up. I tried the gate. It was locked.
Walking back around to the front, I knocked for a third time.
‘Mr Wellis?’
Again, nothing. No sound of movement from inside. I put my ear to the door, just to be sure, but the house was quiet. No voices. No television. For a brief second I thought about trying to pick the locks – then reality kicked in. In broad daylight, it was too risky.
All I could do now was wait.