by Tim Weaver
I gave her a moment and then said, ‘What did they do before they retired?’
‘Dad was a teacher and Mum worked for the council. She and I were born up in Leeds, but Dad was a southern softie.’ She smiled; paused for a second. ‘He was born in Dover and grew up somewhere near Margate, but he did his degree in York. He always joked that he couldn’t wait to get as far away from home as possible; I didn’t know my paternal grandparents because they died before I was born, but from what Dad used to say, my grandfather was a bit of a shit – you know, a drinker, a womanizer, not scared of using a fist or a boot. Anyway, after his degree, Dad worked as a teacher, then he wrote this super-hardcore academic paper on the Second World War which, in university circles, got a lot of people in fawn blazers hot under the collar. “Ideology, Exploitation and Extermination: Realism versus Idealism at the Nuremberg Trials”. Give it a go. It’s an excellent sleeping pill.’
I smiled. ‘And your mum?’
‘She was much less career-orientated. She used to tell Ian and me that all she really wanted to be was a mum, and that any job she had would always be secondary to bringing us up. Mum didn’t work a lot, really, until the early nineties when Ian and I were both at secondary school. She was at the gas board for a while, and then for the last five or six years before she retired she was at Leeds council. Then they both called it a day, bought the house up at Black Gale, and the rest … it’s just …’ History. She blinked, trying to remain stoic. ‘Anyway, like I said, Mum wasn’t hugely driven in that way. I think, to be honest, she missed her true calling.’
‘Which was what?’
‘She was a brilliant runner in her twenties,’ Rina said, smiling. ‘She used to run marathons all over the place and clocked serious times. Even after she stopped competing, she still ran. She was still running in her fifties. She loved it, and she was bloody good at it too.’
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Healy writing something down, sitting out of view of the laptop’s camera.
‘What about Black Gale?’ I asked. ‘Did they like it there?’
‘They loved it.’
‘So no arguments or disagreements with the neighbours – even minor ones?’
‘No.’ Rina shrugged. The baby monitor blinked into life again, the soft sound of her son turning over in his crib. ‘They loved all the guys up there. Dad always used to say it was the best decision they ever made.’
I thanked her, told her I would call her back in half an hour, and then dialled Tori Gibbs’s number. She answered straight away, sitting in an armchair by a set of bookshelves, the lights of the Thames visible behind her. She was in her early fifties, with dark eyes and dark hair; she was also single, with no kids and no distractions other than her work, which must have been how she’d found the time to dig into the disappearances at Black Gale. Her interest in true crime was obvious too, her shelves packed with books about some of history’s most notorious killers. BTK. The Green River Killer. Jack the Ripper. Fred and Rosemary West. The Night Stalker.
We talked for a while about Chris and Laura Gibbs, about Mark too, and then I asked her about the story that had run in the newspapers concerning her brother.
‘That was total bullshit,’ she said.
‘He never had any problems with gambling?’
‘No way. In the tabloids in those first few days, it was a feeding frenzy, so they were all searching for an angle. Whoever they spoke to – if it was even a real person – just lied through their teeth. There was another story in one of the other papers about Mark being “fixated” on this girl he went to school with, again using quotes from an “anonymous source”. That was a bunch of lies too. He posted some comment on this girl’s Instagram feed – like a “You look hot” sort of thing – and that was him apparently obsessed with her. I mean, it was ridiculous. That’s how teenagers communicate, right? Mark was a lovely kid.’
‘I didn’t see that story. Which paper was that in?’
‘I can’t remember. One of the red tops, I think.’
I glanced at Healy and he knew what I was asking him: see if you can find the story she’s talking about online. He picked up my phone and started looking.
Turning back to Tori, I said, ‘The money that Chris made from selling the houses at Black Gale – do you know what he did with it all?’
The answer was already in the police file, but I wanted to see if the information we had tallied up. The Gibbses had a lot of cash swirling around at the end, and while it all appeared to be accounted for, money could often be the cause of bad decisions, as Healy and I had already speculated.
‘He bought a couple of properties as investments,’ Tori replied, ‘and then rented them both out. I think he might have stuck some of it into fixed-rate savings accounts; the rest they just used for holidays, stuff for the house, that sort of thing. They weren’t extravagant people, my brother and Laura.’
That echoed what Ross had told me earlier.
I shifted to the subject of the other residents.
‘Your brother never had any problems with the neighbours?’ I asked.
‘The other people at Black Gale? No, never. In fact, I remember him saying once how lucky he and Laura felt – they’d built those houses, and they’d ended up with three sets of neighbours they loved. I mean, it could have been a disaster. They could have ended up next door to the Manson Family.’ She leaned back in her chair and put her hands behind her head. ‘I stayed up there for a week when they first put those properties on the market,’ she went on, coming back in towards the camera, so her face filled the frame again, ‘and Chris was absolutely bricking it. “What if we end up with neighbours from hell? What if this ruins everything?” He could be a bit of a worrier sometimes, my brother, but actually I could see where he was coming from. He’d built those houses so that they could give themselves and Mark a really nice future, but Chris was right: it could have been an absolute bloody mess. In reality, the whole thing was a big leap into the unknown. And that area, it’s pretty remote. I mean, they’d only just got decent broadband, let alone fibre, and being that secluded – it doesn’t always appeal to everyone, does it?’
She was right. In fact, being so far removed from other people could create problems, and what seemed idyllic to start with could soon become oppressive. I’d wondered, as I’d looked around Black Gale earlier, whether the seclusion might have played a part – could it have led one of the villagers into making an irrational decision? Could it driven them to depression? – but there was no evidence of that and it felt like a stretch. The village was isolated, but it wasn’t at the ends of the earth.
I changed direction. ‘You mentioned last night that you’d done some digging around yourself on Black Gale?’
‘Right.’ She instantly looked apologetic, and said, ‘What you’ve got to remember is that – until you picked up the phone to us all the other day – this whole thing was dead.’
‘It’s okay,’ I replied, holding up a conciliatory hand. ‘The question wasn’t loaded. I was just wondering what you’d found. To me, the police seem to have done a pretty decent job. What do you think?’
‘Don’t ask how I got hold of the file,’ she said, ‘but I’ve seen the investigation and I’d have to say that – broadly – I agree with you.’
‘Only broadly?’
She looked down into her lap and I heard the sound of pages being turned: she must have had a notepad of some kind. When she looked up again, she said, ‘What do you make of the fact that there are no suspicious tyre tracks or footprints?’
‘It could mean a couple of things,’ I replied. ‘Either they all piled into the back of the missing camper van and left voluntarily – or it wasn’t so voluntary.’
‘You’re talking about it being an inside job?’
I glanced at Healy. We’d discussed the same thing earlier.
‘I think we have to consider it,’ I said.
‘What about Randolph and Emiline?’
‘What a
bout them?’
‘No one knows anything about them.’
‘That’s not entirely true.’
‘But it’s almost true,’ she said, and then stopped herself, frowning. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t … Look, I didn’t mean to accuse them of …’ She sighed. ‘You know, the crazy thing is, I’ve spent five years standing up to politicians, holding them to account, picking apart their lies and skewering them on our website, and I’ve become pretty bloody good at what I do. But what happened to Chris and Laura, to Mark, to all the others, it’s the first time I’ve ever felt uncertain of myself.’ She paused again. ‘I guess what I mean is that, when it comes to Randolph and Emiline, everything’s just less … clear.’
‘In what sense?’
‘Asking around, even among friends of theirs, it’s like you get a surface sheen of detail but, when you dig a little deeper, no one really, properly, knows them.’
‘Okay,’ I said. I was being deliberately non-committal, because I didn’t want to accuse Randolph and Emiline of anything ahead of the facts. They had no family and no kids – they’d left their house to charity in their wills – and the majority of the time, families were how the most lucid memories of someone were built. They were also the connections that, quite often, maintained the entire momentum of a missing persons search. So I was less concerned that their friends didn’t know every detail of their lives – or that, unlike the other residents of Black Gale, they appeared, on the surface, more opaque – and more bothered by the fact that theirs was the only vehicle that was missing. That was evident, inarguable, and the longer it took for that camper van to resurface, and the villagers alongside it, the more it seeded doubts about who Randolph and Emiline were.
Out of interest, I asked Tori what she made of the missing vehicle.
‘It’s pretty bloody weird, that’s what I make of it. I mean, it was the only vehicle that wasn’t there the day Ross turned up at the village.’ She opened out her hands, a gesture that said everything about Randolph and Emiline that I’d just been thinking myself. ‘Have you got any leads on it?’
‘Not yet.’ I glanced at Healy again. ‘I’ve got someone trying to trace it.’
‘You won’t find anything. It’s like it vanished, the same as Chris and Laura, the same as all of them. It wasn’t sold on to anyone, there was no SORN declaration made, so if it’s off-road somewhere, it’s being kept that way illegally. It’s a total dead end. The police couldn’t find it – and neither could I.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘leave it with me.’
We talked about the chronology of the house moves – the Perrys were first in, then Randolph and Emiline a month later, then the Daveys a month after that – and then I dialled Rina’s number again and began a conversation between the three of us. It was obvious the two women were comfortable with each other.
‘When was the last time you talked to your brother?’ I asked Tori.
‘That would have been by text three or four days before Halloween, but I spoke to Laura on the phone on the 30th of October, because I was going to this house party in Peckham and I wanted to get a cheesecake recipe from her. Laura was great at all that sort of thing. She was really artsy and creative, a talented cook.’ Tori paused, taking a long breath. ‘Laura was never just a sister-in-law to me. She was a sister. I used to talk on the phone to her more often than to Chris.’
‘And you didn’t get the sense that anything was wrong?’
‘No, nothing.’
‘What about with Mark?’
‘No,’ she said again, even more decisive this time. ‘Like I said, he was a good kid; a little awkward sometimes – your typical teenage boy – but he was polite and sensible, and he loved his mum and dad. Especially his dad. There were only two things Mark wanted to do after he finished school – be a farmer like Chris, and play video games.’
Things petered out after that, so I thanked them and waited for their video windows to snap to black. Rina leaned forward, grabbed her mouse and disappeared.
But Tori didn’t.
‘Is everything all right?’ I asked her.
She’d moved back a little and I could make out more of the background: right angles and blocks of light on the Isle of Dogs, and then the distant towers of Canary Wharf.
‘Tori?’
‘I didn’t want to mention it in front of Rina,’ she said quietly, not looking into the camera, as if she felt guilty about what she wanted to say. ‘I’m not sure if I should mention it at all, in fact, which is why I never said anything when we talked before. I mean, it’s probably nothing and I’ve never been able to prove it one way or another, anyway.’ She looked up now. ‘I deal in facts. Gossip and rumours, I hate all that shit.’
She stopped.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Healy, a pen still clamped between thumb and forefinger, turn around at the desk and shift forward, eyes glued to my laptop.
‘It’s fine,’ I assured her. ‘What is it you want to say?’
‘It’s about Patrick Perry,’ she said.
9
I glanced back at the wall, at the photos of Patrick and Francesca Perry.
‘What about Patrick?’ I asked.
‘It might be nothing,’ Tori said, and began moving in her chair, shifting from side to side: she was hesitant, obviously still conflicted about whether she should say anything. ‘It’s why I haven’t mentioned this to Rina, and especially to Ross, because I don’t want to make a big deal if it’s nothing. I don’t want to be making accusations I can’t back up. I mean, he could have just been doing exactly what he claimed to be doing …’
I shifted closer to the laptop.
‘You’d better spell it out for me, Tori.’
‘Okay,’ she replied, the word pushed out with a sigh. ‘Okay, so like I said to you, it could be nothing at all, but I remember being on the phone to Laura a couple of months before they disappeared, and we were right in the middle of this conversation when she just stopped dead, like someone had interrupted her. I asked her if she was all right, and she was fine – she just said something odd was going on with one of her neighbours.’
Healy and I glanced at each other.
‘What did she mean by “odd”?’ I asked.
‘Patrick. He kept going for these walks out on the moors.’
I frowned. ‘As in hikes?’
‘That’s the thing: Laura didn’t know.’
‘So he could just have been going for a hike?’
‘He could have.’
‘But Laura didn’t think so?’
‘She said he never went out with a backpack, or in hiking shoes. He never bothered with a coat – and he was never gone longer than an hour.’
‘So he was going somewhere close by?’
She held out her hands. ‘I guess.’
‘And in which direction did he head?’
‘Out beyond the back of the farm, into the valley.’
‘Cross-country? Not out of the front, where the main gate into the village is?’
‘No,’ Tori said. ‘Out into the fields.’
‘Did Laura say how often this happened?’
‘I think she said it had happened about three or four times by then.’
‘So not very often at all?’
She could see what I was driving at: because she was so wedded to the idea of it being relevant now, it was hard for her to see how prosaic this revelation was. Three or four times, Patrick had gone out on the moors for an hour – so what?
‘But why wouldn’t he go out with any of the right gear?’ Tori asked. ‘No walking shoes, not even a coat. You don’t think that’s odd?’
‘Did Francesca ever go with Patrick?’
‘Well, that’s the other thing. I think that’s what caught Laura’s attention. He’d head out on to the moors without his wife, and he’d often do it first thing in the morning, or early evening, when the sun wasn’t properly up yet or it was just about to set – like he didn’t want anyone to see him.�
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‘But Francesca must have noticed his absence?’
‘She worked over at Westmorland Hospital in Kendal – she was a senior nurse there – so she always did irregular hours, shift work, all that.’ Tori paused. ‘This is just what Laura said to me. I don’t know a lot about the Perrys, really. But Laura said Patrick was a good-looking guy, charming – not that that means anything, but you know …’ Even unspoken, it was clear to her that Patrick being attractive did mean something. ‘Anyway, point is, he would only go out like that when his wife was working. Whenever she was home they’d go out together, and when it was the two of them they’d have all the right equipment: the shoes, the coats, the backpacks. When it was just him, that was when it was different.’
As Patrick and Francesca Perry stared back at me from the wall, I thought of something Ross had said to me earlier: Even after so many years of being married, they never lost that spark. They just loved spending time together.
So where could Patrick have been going when he was on his own?
Sneaking around like that, if that was even what he was doing, and especially going out so unprepared for a hike, would normally lead to an obvious conclusion: he was going to meet someone; he’d established a relationship in secret, an affair. It happened, even within a successful marriage. But why head out the back, where there were no roads and the moorland went on for miles? Other than the main track in and out of the village, Black Gale’s surroundings were a knotty sprawl of fields, woodland and valleys, not particularly easy to navigate, and the nearest village was a good fifty-minute walk away. Laura Gibbs had told Tori he’d gone and come back inside an hour. There was a sporadic network of narrow back roads, all of which had passing areas, which meant waiting points for a car and whoever he might have been meeting, but it seemed like a lot of unnecessary hassle: if Francesca was at work and he really was having an affair, why wouldn’t Patrick just jump in his own car and drive to where he needed to go?
Could he have been meeting someone else from Black Gale?
I looked at the wall, at the faces of the other residents, mulling over the idea of an affair conducted within the confines of Black Gale. It would have been risky, hard to hide and potentially easy to expose in an environment where all the villagers lived so closely, physically and socially. How could you ever do anything in secret when even something as simple as a walk got spotted? But that didn’t make the idea impossible. And if Laura was the one who’d actually spotted Patrick, and Patrick really was cheating on his wife, that meant he could have been seeing either Freda Davey or Emiline Wilson.
