by Tim Weaver
‘I’ll help you when I get back,’ I said to him afterwards.
‘Back from where?’
‘I’m going to see where Patrick went for his walks.’
I left Healy and headed down the track, around the farm and out past the barns. The Gibbses’ garden ran at an angle, its gentle slope finally ending at the moss-dotted drystone wall that marked the northernmost edge of Black Gale.
I climbed over a stile. The moorland on the other side was boggy, the grass saturated from the storm the day before, but two worn trails were immediately visible, marked out by years of passing hikers: one headed east to west, the other directly north from the village. I followed the northern path out from the wall, across land belonging to the Gibbses and then beyond the boundaries of what was theirs, into the dip of the valley. Occasionally, I would stop and take a picture in an effort to document the area – so that I could remind myself later on of the surroundings and the route that Patrick may have taken if he’d pursued this exact trail every time he came out here – but mostly I just walked. As the valley dropped, more trees started to emerge, gathering in the folds of the hills, and after a while, when I stopped and looked back, I realized the moors had sloped so dramatically that I was actually below the level of the village now; all I could see of it was a chimney stack on the side of the farmhouse, rising above the spine of the hill.
I checked the time, saw that I’d only been going for about fifteen minutes and decided to carry on for a while, switching my thoughts back to Patrick and his trips out here at sunrise and sunset in the weeks and months before he, and the others, had vanished. A clump of trees was up ahead, their branches dense and tangled, the leaves yet to form. As I got closer, I could see glimpses of exposed roots, with muddy pockets of water between the trunks.
I stood for a moment, looking around, trying to see if I recognized this part of the moors from Patrick’s photographs, but it didn’t seem familiar. It was cooler here, though, the sound more muted, the light greyer because the sun had slipped behind the eastern flank of the valley. In among the trees there was a narrow sliver of a trail, snaking between the knotty roots. I decided to follow it in, curious about where it ended up, and as I did, what light there was fell through the canopy and created patterns on the ground. The effect was mildly discomfiting: everything seemed to be moving, dancing, but if you were looking for a place to lie low, to not be seen – and somewhere only a twenty-minute walk away from Black Gale – this was perfect.
I headed back up the slope, the way I’d come in.
At the drystone wall, I took the east–west trail, the route much flatter as it followed a tiny stream towards a braid of peaks. After half a mile of going west, I double-backed on myself, came up and around the edge of the village and entered through the main gate. As I did, I saw Healy moving from the Perrys’ house to the one next door – the Daveys’ – writing something down as he walked.
‘Find anything?’ I asked once I’d reached him.
He shook his head. ‘Nothing so far. You?’
‘No. There’s a good meeting spot down there, though.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Only twenty minutes away, but properly isolated.’
He looked towards the valley.
‘You really think he was having an affair with Freda or Emiline?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, because we didn’t.
I worked in the opposite direction to him, starting with the farm, then Randolph Solomon and Emiline Wilson’s, then John and Freda Davey’s house, and finally Patrick and Francesca Perry’s. In each of them, I emptied out drawers and went through wardrobes and cupboards, ensuring I hadn’t missed anything, but by the time I returned to the Perrys’ hallway, the smell of the plug-in strong in the air, I’d found nothing.
‘No luck?’ Healy said, meeting me outside.
‘No. You?’
He shook his head.
I glanced at Randolph and Emiline’s place.
‘You didn’t get anywhere tracing that missing camper van?’
‘No,’ Healy said. ‘Total dead end, just like Tori Gibbs said.’
So where was it?
I looked at the other cars and then at the single empty driveway.
‘We should probably go,’ I said.
He didn’t respond, because it was obvious he was reluctant to. He liked being out here, even if he hadn’t found anything, because it wasn’t the confines of the hotel we were in, or the hotel he’d been forced to flee to in Newcastle before that, or the house he’d rarely left down in Devon. This was freedom of a sort: a wide open space where he didn’t have to look over his shoulder the whole time; perhaps more than that, a place where he could think like a cop again.
I gave him a moment and headed back to the car.
A few minutes later, we left, cloud beginning to build, the sun drifting in and out of view as we headed south to the B road. Healy talked to me as we drove, and I listened to enough of it to respond to his ideas, his theories, ways in which we could push forward on the case – but in the puddles on the road, in the dew-soaked grass on either bank, I also found a repetition that helped me forge a separate path in my own thoughts, back to the moorland I’d walked, to all the unanswered questions.
It meant I was seeing the road, but I wasn’t concentrating on it.
A second later, I hit something.
14
The deer seemed to come out of nowhere.
It was suddenly there, in front of us, frozen in the centre of the road. I had time to see its antlers, the black glint of its eyes, to watch its body begin to shift away from us – and then I slammed into it. The left-hand side of the Audi crunched against the rear flank of its body, the impact seeming to tremor through to the dashboard. The sound was horrific: the dull tear of metal, the hiss of a radiator, the terrible, prolonged squeal of the deer itself; and then the car hit a bank.
The airbags exploded out at us.
I wasn’t sure if I blacked out entirely – it felt like I could hear the car creaking and rasping around me the whole time – but when everything came back into focus, thirty seconds had passed and I could feel blood running from my nose and mouth. I looked across at Healy. He was conscious but dazed, staring out of the windscreen as it began to mist up. I touched a hand to his arm. ‘You all right?’
‘What the hell just happened?’ he muttered.
‘We hit a deer.’
I opened my door, undid my belt and got out, passing the broken body of the deer on the road, and then went around to Healy’s side. After sitting him down on a bump in the bank, I looked him over. He was worse off than me: there were two big cuts on the left-hand side of his face and he was holding his arm at the elbow, where it must have crunched against the door. He might even have been in shock: he was staring ahead, past the body of the deer, to the other side of the track.
I checked my phone, looking for a signal, but we had to be in a black spot. I wasn’t sure what I would have done even if I’d had any bars. Was I really going to call an ambulance? Doing that would endanger both of us. Healy had a fake passport identifying himself as Bryan Kennedy, but hospitals meant questions, and not just about who he was and how he’d got injured, but about why he didn’t have an NI number and didn’t exist on the system. Worse, it might mean hospital staff deciding to phone the police.
He looked up, his expression replicating everything I’d just been thinking. But one of the gashes on his face was bad. It would need to be treated – and ideally not out here on exposed moorland with the light drifting in and out. When the sun was shining, it was fine. When it went in, the temperature dropped like a stone.
I went to the body of the deer, held a hand flat to its belly and checked that it was definitely dead. It had suffered already and I didn’t want it to suffer any more. Once I was sure, I grabbed it by the legs and started dragging it in the direction of the grass bank. Normal procedure was to call the police, so that someone could come and retrieve the body, b
ut that would create the same problems as taking Healy to hospital, so I made sure the deer was as far from the road as possible and then returned to the car and fired it up again. It spat, the chassis kicking, rocking from the front, but then it gently began to idle. It didn’t sound right – something was ticking loudly in the engine – and when I put it into reverse and tried to pull back from the bank, the front wheels spun on the gravel.
I asked Healy if he could get into the driver’s seat and try to reverse the Audi while I gave it a push from the front. It took a long time, both of us becoming frustrated, but finally it worked: gravel ricocheted off the car, mud flecked my trousers, then the wheels gripped.
We swapped seats, I turned the car around and we headed towards the village again. I’d noticed a first-aid kit in the farmhouse, and there were blankets, flannels and hand towels in the airing cupboards at all four homes.
Five minutes later, we were back at Black Gale.
We drove all the way down the track, pulling up outside the farm. Helping Healy out, I opened the property and we headed inside, and then I left him on one of the chairs in the kitchen as I went searching for the first-aid kit. I found it in the utility room. The box of plasters was a little under half full and, as I looked at them, I wondered when they were last used. Months before the Gibbses disappeared? Weeks? The night they went missing? I grabbed the plasters and then a dressing, tearing it out of its packet and returning to Healy, telling him to press it to the cuts while I went to fetch water.
‘Where are you going to get water from?’
He was right: the taps hadn’t run here for two and a half years.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve got some in the car.’
Once I’d grabbed a bottle I kept in the boot, I returned to the house, told Healy to lean over the sink and started to empty the water over his cuts. They’d begun to clot already and most probably only required the plasters, but the gash at his eye was pretty deep.
‘You need to learn to drive straight, Raker.’
It broke the charged atmosphere.
‘But that grass bank came out of nowhere,’ I said.
He returned my smile.
It took me a couple of minutes to clean and dress the wounds, then I grabbed a blanket from the airing cupboard upstairs and handed it to him. I pulled out a chair and sat down opposite him at the table. I’d barely had time to stop and think about myself, but now, as I finally began to relax, I could feel pain all along my neck – the effects of whiplash – and real discomfort, perhaps bruising, across my front, right shoulder to left hip, where the seatbelt had locked hard.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
‘I’ll survive.’
He nodded. ‘I guess that’s what we do.’
I looked out of the kitchen window at my car. The left-hand edge was badly damaged, the headlight smashed, the grille bent, some of the bumper pushed back in towards the engine. I needed to find the number of someone local who could repair it for me; there was no way I could drive back to London with it looking like that. If I’d been on my own, I might have taken the gamble. But if I got stopped by the cops on the motorway, there was a chance they would work a trail back to here, to the hotel, and ultimately to Healy. Everything had to be looked at through the same lens, every decision taken on the basis of whether it might expose him.
‘So what now?’ he asked.
I took a moment before replying, steeling myself.
‘I think it would be a good idea if you stayed here.’
He frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The car’s a mess. It’s a fifty-mile drive back to the hotel, and thirty-five miles of that is motorway. If there are cops out, there’s every chance they’ll pull us over and that means having to explain everything. It’s safer if you’re not a part of that.’
‘I’m not staying here.’
‘It’ll be for a day,’ I said. ‘Two at the most.’
‘Two days in this place? Forget it.’
‘I need to get the car repaired.’
‘Then I’ll come with you.’
‘I just told you, that’s not a good idea.’
‘I’m not staying here, Raker. There’s no way I’m sitting on my hands for the next forty-eight hours staring at the walls. Even if the sum total of my contribution to this case is locking myself in that hotel room and going through paperwork for you, it’s better than staying in a house that no one lives in, in the middle of nowhere. I can’t do that any more.’ He paused, squeezing his eyes shut, his fingers going to the wound I’d dressed. ‘Look,’ he said, his voice quieter, more contained, ‘I spent a long time living on my own in Devon. You know that. I’ve barely had contact with anyone but you. I’ve had no life, just this secret. I know you’re looking out for me, I know what you told me on the way up here in the car this morning about Annabel, about how we’ve still got that arsehole McCaskell on our tail, I know the risks. I do. I understand them. But what you’ve got to understand is that these past two days have been better than any of the days I’ve had over the past three and a half years. So don’t make me do this, okay? Please don’t leave me here.’
I looked at him and then back out of the window again, annoyed, sympathetic, conflicted. The sun had disappeared completely now, cloud knitted together in the sky, the light greyer and more sombre. My gaze drifted from the car, up to the main gate of the village, the legs on the Black Gale sign rocking in their bed as the wind picked up.
And then I realized it wasn’t the legs that were moving.
It was a person, coming out from behind it.
There was somebody else here.
Caraca
1985
Los Angeles | Tuesday 23 July
‘My name’s Detective Kader. I’m with the Sheriff’s Department.’
Jo held up her badge.
The manager of the Star Inn was a Latino man in his late forties with a week’s beard growth and a pot belly. He looked from her photograph to her face, then back to the photograph. ‘We don’t get so many lady police detectives coming in here.’
He said lady like he was trying to come on to her.
‘Well, this is what we look like,’ Jo replied. A scarred walnut counter lay between her and the manager, and in a room out the back she could see a couch malformed by age and a TV playing old reruns of I Love Lucy. The guy had dragged in a fan from somewhere and set it up where he’d been sitting, and it was on so hard it was gradually blowing a half-eaten jelly doughnut across a plate.
‘The a/c’s broke,’ he said, seeing where her eyes were at.
‘Ever thought about getting it fixed?’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah, when I win the state lottery.’
It was hot as hell inside, hotter than the second-floor room she’d just left, but she’d take the heat in here to the scene upstairs any day of the week. Once Dan Chen and his assistant had got the young man out of the tub and on to a sheet on the bathroom floor, they’d been able to see the full extent of what the acid had done to him, and it had been difficult to look at. The kid had been shot through the cheekbone from close range, the bullet entering just under his right eye, and livor mortis – the way blood had pooled inside his body – seemed to confirm that he’d been dropped into the tub, face down, pretty soon after. Chen believed the acid was added once the man was in the bath, and that the body had been there for between thirty-six and forty-eight hours, based on the amount of damage the acid had already done to the corpse: it had eaten away at his front, turning his face, chest, groin and shins into a creamy mulch; a paste that had begun to slide away from the bone. A few more days and they would have been picking him out of the tub in bits; after seven, they would have needed a shovel.
Jo got out her notebook.
‘You called in the scene upstairs, is that right?’
‘That’s right,’ the manager said.
‘What time did you find him like that?’
‘About 4 a.m. The couple in the room nex
t door came down and said they could smell something bad.’ He shrugged again, as if he heard that complaint all the time. ‘Place like this, that usually means a blocked drain, a blocked toilet – or a dead body.’
‘So you knocked on his door?’
‘Sure. Went up and knocked about twenty times.’
‘And there was no response?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Which is when you let yourself in?’
‘Correct.’
It was the same story he’d given the first responders.
‘What’s your name, sir?’
‘Rivaldo Torus.’
‘You got a guestbook here, Rivaldo?’
Torus reached under the counter. The guestbook had leather covers, but the pages had yellowed and there were coffee stains all over the front. He opened it up about three quarters of the way in, today’s date printed at the top, and then flipped back a couple of pages.
Spinning it around, Torus pointed to the second-from-last guest name.
‘There he is.’
Gabriel Wilzon.
‘Did he show you any ID?’ Jo asked.
‘No,’ Torus responded, as if the idea were absurd. ‘Most of the guests here, they pay cash. I mean, we ain’t exactly the Chateau Marmont, you know what I’m saying?’
‘So he checked in last Friday?’
‘That’s what it says.’
Today was Tuesday. He’d been here four nights, and if Chen was right, the kid had been lying in a tub full of acid for two of them. There was no way he was actually called Gabriel Wilzon – after Torus had told the first responders what name the guy had used to check in, Jo had done the legwork and tried to find someone with that name, matching the guy’s general description or approximate age. But there were no missing persons reports, and no one in their early twenties with either a social security number, driver’s licence or criminal record using the name. There might be something to be gained in finding out why he chose Wilzon for a fake name, especially with the unusual z – in Jo’s experience, these things were rarely selected at random – but that relied on knowing more about him, and at the moment they couldn’t lift his prints because his fingertips had dissolved, and they didn’t have a face because his features were like melted wax.
