by Tim Weaver
His voicemail kicked in again.
This time, I left a message: ‘DI Quinn, my name’s David Raker. I find missing people. I wanted to talk to you about Patrick Perry. I’d appreciate a callback.’ I kept it at that, left him my mobile number and hung up. I didn’t have to wait long for a response: three minutes later, my phone started chiming, the display flashing PRIVATE, and when I answered and said my name, I got nothing in response except silence. In the background, I heard phones, conversation, the low drone of an office.
Finally, a voice said, ‘This is Kevin Quinn.’
‘DI Quinn, I appreciate –’
‘What do you want?’
He was already on the defensive.
‘I’ve been asked by Ross Perry and the families of the people who lived at Black Gale to look into what happened to them.’ I stopped for a moment. I was banking on him knowing all about Black Gale already, but I doubted he would be prepared for a voicemail message out of the blue about it, two and a half years on, especially as it had never been a case at the Met, let alone a case he’d worked himself. Not that he wouldn’t already have followed this entire exchange to its natural end point: I’d worked out that he was Patrick Perry’s source, and now I wanted help.
I quickly tried to allay any sense of enmity or panic he might have been feeling: ‘Just so we’re absolutely clear, I’ve got no interest in anything other than finding out where Patrick went. I’d like to ask you some questions, I’m hoping you can give me some answers – and, once you have, I’ll hang up this phone and we’ll never speak again.’
More silence on the line.
‘DI Quinn?’
Nothing.
‘DI Qui–’
‘I’ll call you back.’
The line went dead.
The rain was crunching off the bus shelter now, off the road too, creating a fine gossamer mist between Mills’s house and where I was standing. I checked the windows of his home and nothing had changed. The shutters were closed, no lights were on. I didn’t even know if he was actually home.
My phone started ringing again.
This time, the number wasn’t private, it was blocked.
‘What do you want?’ Quinn said, straight out the gate.
Wherever he was now, it was quieter.
‘I just want to talk to you about Patrick Perry.’
He didn’t answer immediately, maybe wondering whether he could deny ever knowing Patrick. But then he must have realized it was pointless: ‘What about him?’
‘He called you in the months before he vanished.’
No response.
‘Eleven times,’ I pressed him, trying to keep my voice passive. ‘Patrick made nine calls to you, including an initial sixteen-minute one, and you made two to him.’
I wanted him to know that I had everything I needed to connect the dots, but I also wanted him to talk to me – so I chose to wait for him, our silence long. In reality, I had zero interest in turning this into a conversation where he either talked or I promised him the world would know what he’d done for Patrick Perry. But if he thought it was a possibility, I might get him onside.
‘So what do you want from me?’ he said eventually. His tone was suspicious.
‘You were his source when he was a journalist, correct?’
‘Sounds like you know the answer to that already.’
‘That was when you were both in Manchester?’
‘Yes.’
‘But then you moved south and you stopped talking?’
‘I moved south,’ he said, ‘and then Perry went into PR.’
‘So what made him pick up the phone to you again?’
He let out a long breath. ‘He wanted some information about someone.’
‘Who?’
‘Some woman.’
‘A woman? What was her name?’
‘It was two and a half years ago – how the hell am I supposed to remember?’ But then he sighed, and I heard him moving, doors opening and closing. ‘Hold on.’
Another prolonged period of quiet followed – and then, suddenly, there was an explosion of voices, the sound of a drawer squealing on its runners, before the voices faded all over again. He’d been back to his office for something. A notebook, perhaps.
‘Beatrix Steards,’ he said.
‘That was the name of the woman Patrick asked about?’
‘Correct.’
‘How are you spelling that?’
He gave me her surname and I wrote it down.
‘Who was she?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’ There was an aggressive slant to his voice now. He was starting to get impatient, angry at himself for being compromised. ‘Some university student.’
Again, I felt thrown.
Why would Patrick call Kevin Quinn about a university student?
‘So – what? – Patrick wanted an address for her?’
‘No, he wanted to take a look at her file.’
I frowned. ‘Her file?’
‘Thirty years ago, Beatrix Steards vanished into thin air.’
25
The rain eased off for a moment, the wind dying. I glanced up the road to Isaac Mills’s house, checking no one was watching me, and then dug out my notebook and a pen.
‘Beatrix Steards is a missing person?’
‘Like I just told you,’ Quinn replied sharply.
‘When did she disappear?’
‘1987.’
Thirty-one years ago.
‘Do you know how?’
‘She was at some house party in Lambeth.’
‘Lambeth in London?’
‘Do you know any other Lambeths?’
He made it sound like a stupid question, but it wasn’t: why would Patrick be looking into the disappearance of a woman in a city that he’d never worked or lived in?
Why would he be looking into a disappearance at all?
‘So she was at university in London as well, then?’
‘Yeah,’ he responded gruffly. ‘King’s College, it says here. She was at a house party in March 1987, left about 11.45 p.m., and that was the last time anyone saw her.’
I tried to clear my head. At the time he went missing, Patrick hadn’t worked as a journalist or freelancer for over three years, had shown no signs of ever wanting to go back, and in fact was riding high on the success of his PR firm. Not only was the growth of his company taking up his entire working life, financially its rewards far outweighed any writing work he might have been – for whatever reason – hoping to pitch. So, whatever it was he saw in the story of Beatrix Steards, it couldn’t have been commercial, and it was even harder to imagine that he was doing it in order to get back into journalism. Off the back of that, I remembered an interview Ross had given to the police where he recollected a conversation he’d had with his father only weeks before Halloween. I didn’t recall it verbatim, but I remembered enough: Patrick had told Ross that setting up the PR business was the best decision he’d ever made.
So why the sudden interest in Beatrix Steards?
‘Did he say why he wanted her file?’ I asked Quinn.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘He just said he wanted to look into it. I wondered why at the time, but not enough to get involved. We caught up, he asked for the file, and then I sent it to him. The arrangement we had back in Manchester was a two-way street, and he no longer had any column inches to give me, so I agreed to help him out for old times’ sake, and because it sounded like it was important to him, but I told him that was it. I couldn’t do it again. The other calls he made after that were all questions about the file – terminology, acronyms, that sort of thing. The file was put together in 1987, when the Steards girl first vanished, so some of the lingo we don’t use any more. It was mostly calls to clarify that – except for one, when he asked about a guy called …’
I heard the crisp snap of pages being turned.
‘Adrian Vale.’
I wrote the name next to Beatrix Steards.
&
nbsp; ‘Who was he?’ I asked.
‘He was the last man to see Steards alive. Perry asked if I could dig around and find out more about this Vale guy – aside from what was in Steards’s file – but I remember the search went nowhere because Vale died a long time ago – in 1989.’
‘Did Vale have a record?’
‘No, he was just a student, like her. Same university, same course.’
‘Do you know if Beatrix Steards has ever been found?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘And Patrick definitely never said why he was looking into her?’
‘I just told you, didn’t I?’ His voice was rising again, but I got the sense this time that his impatience wasn’t a reaction to me asking him questions, or even to the way he’d allowed himself to be manipulated, it was a reaction to his own, lingering feelings of guilt. He’d given Patrick exactly what he’d asked for, and had done it not thinking for a minute it would lead to this moment; to the possibility that, somewhere in the months between that first phone call and Halloween was the reason Patrick and eight others had disappeared. And it might have been the Steards case that acted as the trigger. It might have been the reason Patrick was heading out to the moors.
It might be why he’d lied about the camera.
Even so, I struggled to make any links. There had been no evidence of Beatrix Steards in Patrick’s Internet history, no evidence of her anywhere in his life. This had come completely out of left field. So why did she matter to him? Twenty-eight years after she went missing, and over three years after he left journalism, why would Patrick suddenly become interested in this case?
‘You got a DOB for Steards?’ I asked.
‘Fourth of March 1965.’
‘And where was she born?’
‘Hammersmith.’
So she was born in London, presumably grew up in London, and then went to university in London too. What could have led Patrick to her? Had they met at some stage? Could she have been based in the north for a period of time? In 1987, at the time of her disappearance, Patrick would have been twenty-two, so was it possible they were involved romantically?
‘Are we done?’ Quinn asked, disrupting my train of thought.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I just need one more thing from you.’
Quinn made a sound: he knew what was coming.
‘I’d like the file on Beatrix Steards.’
He took a moment, drawing in a breath that crackled down the line, and then he said, ‘Look, if I do this for you, I don’t ever want to hear from you again, you got it? I just about managed to survive this whole shitstorm by the skin of my teeth the first time round because investigators up north never looked back far enough into Perry’s phone calls. I got sloppy back then, letting him call me at work like that, but it’s never happening again. It felt like I didn’t sleep for months when that was going on. So if I send this to you, that’s it. You get the file, you delete my number, and it’s goodnight.’
‘I told you at the start that was what I’d do.’
‘Yeah, well, I’ve heard of you before, Raker – you’re like a swear word in this place – so forgive me if I find it hard to believe the word of a man the Met despises.’
I didn’t bother trying to defend myself or argue the point, because I’d already got what I wanted and attempting to convince a cop polluted by the opinions of other cops was an unwinnable battle. I’d worked cases that had ruffled feathers at the Met. I’d picked up and solved missing persons searches that had long been consigned to a drawer there. That had made me enemies in London I hadn’t intended, didn’t want, but had to accept. So I asked Quinn to get me a digital version of Beatrix Steards’s missing persons file and gave him the URL and password to a website where he could drop the file securely. He grunted in response and hung up.
The rain started lashing down again.
Going to Google, I tried to find any mention of Beatrix Steards’s disappearance online. There was very little: just one account on a website dedicated to long-term missing people, and it didn’t add anything to what I’d already found out from Quinn. The paucity of articles didn’t concern me, because cases that predated the Internet and the digitization of media outlets often didn’t have corresponding stories online, but it meant – if I got nothing from the file Quinn sent me – I’d probably have to start tapping into national newspaper archives.
There was only one photograph of Beatrix Steards online.
It was small and low res but, despite the quality, I could see enough. She was petite and slim – maybe five three, maybe eight stone – and, at the time the picture was taken, presumably at some point in the mid eighties, she had a short, dark bob and was dressed in a spandex miniskirt and black leather jacket. Her eyes were difficult to define because of how the sunlight was falling across her, but I could see a distinguishing mark just below her right eye – a mole, perhaps, or a minor scar.
Who are you?
I continued to stare at her, trying to make sense of what I’d just learned, trying to figure out the connections to Patrick, to the others at Black Gale, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something through the rain: movement at the front of the house.
Isaac Mills was leaving.
26
As soon as I saw him unlock his car, I moved, heading back down the road, leaving the refuge of the bus shelter behind. The rain was fierce now, carving in at a horizontal, the wind screaming in my ears. I’d left my Audi two streets along, parked out of sight, but – although he would get a head start on me – I wasn’t going to be far behind him.
I got to the car, slid in at the wheel and started up the engine, and then saw his Lexus pass the bottom of the road I was in. Pulling out, I fell into line four vehicles back.
He headed south-east, in the direction of Bradford. I let a couple of cars out at a junction on the edge of the town, playing it safe by putting more distance between us, even though the rain was a useful veil: it had eased off, but the wind had got up, and it created a swirling grey curtain as we hit a dual carriageway.
He went as far as Bingley, midway between Keighley and Bradford, and then took the turn-off. It was another mile before I realized that he was following the signs for something called Keygrave Mill. I had no idea what was there, but the signs for it were brown, which meant it was a tourist attraction.
Now I was even less certain what he was doing.
I managed to keep at least three cars behind him the whole time, and knowing the rough direction he was headed meant I could drop right back: after a while, I was two or three bends off the pace, and only catching the occasional glimpse of his blue Lexus up front – which meant, unless he stopped dead, he’d never see me tailing him.
Finally, I got to the turning.
The mill was immediately visible the moment I came off the road, a restored stone building with two vast chimneys and a waterwheel on the side. It was flanked by fields on the left and a maze of old, terraced cottages on the right, and the car park was rammed. As I came down the drive towards it, I could see Mills’s Lexus already pulling into a space next to a pair of huge windows: on the other side of the glass was a restaurant, mothers at tables with young babies, and a play area for toddlers at the far end.
What the hell is he doing here?
I slowed down, not wanting to enter the car park as he was heading for the mill, but once he’d gone into the main doors I found the first space I could and swung the Audi in, front end first, so the damage was hidden from view. I grabbed a baseball cap from the boot and swapped my sweater – the same one I’d been wearing when Mills and I met at Black Gale – for a windbreaker. It wasn’t much of a disguise, but it was something.
I made my way inside.
Keeping to a wall, so I only had to be aware of what was around me on one side, I moved through the mill from front to back. The restaurant was heaving, every table occupied, but I couldn’t see him seated anywhere, or in the queue for food; he wasn’t in the next part
of the building either, where a gift shop occupied one side and a museum the other. I couldn’t get into the museum without paying, but I could see enough of it through a series of windows.
I got to a set of stairs, with signs directing visitors to conference and reception rooms, and then realized I’d missed a door: it went through to a temporary exhibit full of black-and-white photos documenting Keygrave’s years as a textile mill.
He was in there.
I backed up, watching him through a small glass panel in the door. There was no one else in the room except him. At first I assumed that was the whole point, that he was here because he was meeting someone and knew the exhibit would be quiet, but he didn’t seem remotely interested in anything but the photos.
So was this really what he’d come all this way for?
A photography exhibition?
About ten minutes later, his mobile chimed.
He got it out, checked his texts and then pocketed his phone again, and after a final look at one of the last few photographs started coming towards me. I nipped up the stairs and out of sight, waiting for him to pass, and then came back down again to merge with the crowds behind him. He headed straight past the museum and the gift shop to the restaurant. This time, it was obvious that he was looking for someone – maybe the person who’d sent the text – his eyes switching from one table to the next.
I tried to see ahead of him, tried to imagine who was waiting for him.
He stopped at a table midway into the room.
There were four seats, three of them occupied, one by an attractive woman in her mid forties, the others by a girl of about fifteen and a boy of maybe ten or eleven.
