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2000s: How do you help a man who doesn’t even remember who he is
2000s: How do you help a man who doesn’t even remember who he is
When a young man wakes up bruised and beaten, with no memory of who he is or where he came from, the press immediately dub him ‘The Lost Man’.
Naming himself Richard Kite, he spends the next ten months desperately trying to find out who he is. But despite media appeals and the efforts of the police, no one knows him.
Richard’s last hope may be private investigator David Raker – a seasoned locator of missing people. But Raker has more questions than answers.
Who is Richard Kite?
Why does no one know him?
And what links him to the body of a woman found beside a London railway line two years ago?
Could Richard be responsible for her death – or is he next?
The starting point for any investigation being beside the water and a remote part at that, is not going to be easy. ColdWell point where the RNLI is located is described like this:
Beyond him, vessels, carved out trails on the water, huge tankers slowly making their way south, speedboats, yachts – their wakes interconnected, the chop and rhythm of the sea eventually washing all the way back to us. When he finally looked up, th sun was gone and the sky had started to bruise
The discovery of this man is the talk of the town and he’s being living in a caravan on the outskirts of the New Forest trying to survive. But how do you do that without an identity? How do you end up near an RNLI station of all places? They don’t think he swam there as the largest point in Southampton Water is over a mile wide so the mystery, and the plot thickens.
The investigation takes the police out to London and to New Forest where Richard has been living. It’s a wide net and what they’re going to catch is anyone’s guess.
The investigation in London takes David Raker down some very historical paths. Monument to the Great fire of London, the docklands, the small alleyways down to the river Thames. The area of Abbeywood where the body is found has been called a dumpgin ground by the local papers.
Set along the Wallace strait, both of which are fictional, this forms the part of the mysterious travelogue in the story. ” In a lot of ways, it’s like a living museum, a place that exists on the periphery of Britain, in a bubble of time forty years old. And there’s the idea that..” the folk here are harboring some dark and terrible secret ….supposed to be alight hearted comment..but .the truth is, by the time you leave, you’re not so sure any more.Because it actually feels like it might be”
There is another location but to tell you that…you’d have to go missing yourself….
Author/Guide: Tim Weaver Destination: Southampton, New Forest, London Departure Time: 2000s
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