The Lies We Told(23)
‘OK, so this is footage from seven thirty-six on Tuesday evening.’ Anderson went on, ‘If you watch, you’ll see Luke leave the building and walk towards Broadwick Street.’
The sudden shock of seeing Luke’s image, his posture and gait so familiar, so loved, triggered such a rush of longing that her eyes swam. She stared hard at the screen, watching as he left Brindle and turned to call something over his shoulder, giving a brief wave. ‘George,’ she murmured. ‘He’s waving goodbye to George, the security guard.’
Anderson nodded. ‘OK. Keep watching.’
At that moment, a blue van appeared, approaching Luke from behind. The second it passed him it stopped, obscuring him from view. She glanced up at Anderson in confusion. ‘What …?’
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘The van stops for eight seconds … OK, now it’s moving off again.’ Sure enough, the van continued on its journey to the end of Duck Lane, whereupon it turned right and disappeared from view. Next, Anderson leant forward and with a few clicks of the mouse called up a different camera angle, this time giving a view of Broadwick Street. ‘As you can see, Luke doesn’t reappear, either before, during, or at any time after those eight seconds that the van stopped for.’
‘Well, didn’t he just turn right?’ she asked. ‘Towards Wardour Street I mean?’
Anderson shook his head. ‘We’ve checked all the CCTV footage and Luke doesn’t reappear again anywhere in the vicinity, on any of the surrounding streets.’
Clara stared at him. ‘So … he got into the van?’
‘There’s nowhere else he could have gone.’
Her mind raced. ‘Then it must have been a friend of his driving – or at least someone he knew?’
‘Possibly.’ Anderson leant back and folded his arms. ‘The van stops for eight seconds. We have no way of knowing why Luke got inside.’ He paused and looked at Clara. ‘What we do know is that the van was stolen from a business address in Ealing, late on Monday evening.’
‘Stolen? But …’
‘We managed to track its onward journey as far as the M20, but we lose ANPR coverage of it shortly after it leaves the motorway and heads in the direction of the Kent Downs, not far from Dover.’
She tried to make sense of what he was telling her, mentally searching for possible explanations, but found none. She shook her head. ‘Sorry, I don’t …’
Anderson switched off the computer and took the seat next to hers, his eyes focused on her face. ‘We’re doing everything we can to find the van, Clara. And we will find it. But in the meantime we’re appealing for witnesses who might have been in the vicinity when Luke disappeared.’
Panic climbed in her chest. ‘What about the emails?’ she asked at last. ‘Do you have any idea who sent them?’
‘Not yet, no. We’ve traced them to several different servers belonging to various internet cafés across London. Not one of them had working CCTV, which might be coincidence but probably isn’t. We still have no way of knowing whether the person who sent them is connected to Luke’s disappearance. What we do know is that Luke hasn’t withdrawn any money from his account since last Monday, nor did he take out any significant sums in the days leading up to his disappearance, which indicates that he hadn’t been planning to go anywhere for any length of time. As you know, he didn’t take his passport or credit card.’
It was only then that she remembered Luke’s sweatshirt. ‘I saw something,’ she said. ‘In my neighbour’s flat.’
Anderson listened patiently as she told her story. ‘It might not have been his, of course,’ she added, ‘but it’s pretty distinctive.’ Her eyes searched the detective’s face uncertainly. ‘I don’t know if …’
‘We’ll look into it,’ Anderson told her as he got up and nodded at her to follow. ‘We were intending to speak to your neighbours again anyway. I’ll let you know what we find out.’
And that was it. She was alone again, standing in the street, looking back at the black bricks of the police station. She turned and began to walk home. Had Luke known the driver of the van? If not, why did he get in it? If it was someone he knew, had he known the van was stolen? It seemed so unlikely – Luke wasn’t the law-breaking type, and as far as she was aware, he didn’t know any criminals. But if he hadn’t known the driver, then why did he get in the van? Had he been forced to? In central London, while it was still fairly light out? That didn’t seem likely either. She jumped from possibility to possibility, but came up with nothing.
The quiet emptiness of her flat seemed to close in on her as she restlessly paced its rooms. It was Friday evening, the end of the third day without Luke, and the weekend stretched ahead of her interminably. She thought suddenly of her parents, and realized guiltily that she hadn’t yet told them what had happened, that it hadn’t even occurred to her to ring them. Quickly she ran to fetch her phone. But returning to the sofa she sat staring down at it for a long, silent moment, before eventually letting it fall, unused, to her lap.
She was an only child, a late and unexpected baby born in Penge to a medical secretary and a bank clerk in their mid-forties. It had always seemed to Clara growing up that Linda and Graham Haynes had never quite acclimatized themselves to the arrival of a child. Clara’s presence seemed to constantly take them by surprise, and she spent much of her childhood playing quietly alone, or trailing after them while they visited garden centres, or car boot sales, not entirely sure they had remembered she was there. They hadn’t been unkind, not at all, and they seemed to love her, in their way, yet she felt that she had always remained a puzzle to them. They’d looked on, nonplussed, while she devoured books, or spent hours writing stories, and were clearly baffled when she won a place at university – the first in the family to have done so. They’d retired to the Algarve the moment Clara had entered halls and, in their mid-seventies now, were quiet, private people, prone to anxiety, fond of their familiar routines and their own company, though they dutifully phoned their only daughter every other Sunday without fail.