by Tim Weaver
Half an hour later, Black Gale filled every inch of it.
I took a moment to make myself a coffee and then returned to the wall again, to the reminders of the course Healy and I had been trying to plot, and to Beatrix Steards’s name, which I’d now added. Seconds later, my phone started ringing, shattering the quiet of the cottage. I grabbed it, looking at the display.
It was a Leeds area code.
‘It’s me,’ Healy said as soon as I answered, almost shouting the words, his voice swamped by the sound of passing traffic. He must have been at a phone box on a main road.
‘Is everything okay?’
‘Yeah, fine. Managed to find a place just outside the city centre with a bed like concrete. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what we found at the house,’ he said, changing the subject instantly, trying to retain his connection to our search, ‘and about Randolph Solomon. He’s the only one with a proven connection to this Seiger and Sten, right? Randolph was using them to handle his legal affairs. Then this Isaac Mills, he works for Seiger and Sten – so what if Randolph and Mills knew each other? Or what about if it’s worse? What about if they were working together?’
‘What, you think Randolph is behind all of this?’
‘I know you’ve been thinking the same thing.’
It was true, I’d considered it – not least because of the missing camper van – but, according to Ross, Randolph’s connection to Seiger and Sten was simple enough to follow: he’d lived in York before Black Gale – although I still needed to confirm that – and he’d then used the company to wind up his father’s estate in the seventies, and for other legal issues in the time since, including his and Emiline’s move out to the Dales. But the longer I went without being able to disprove Randolph’s involvement, the longer suspicion would linger, so, for now, I decided to focus on what I knew for sure, and what I could control: Patrick Perry, the lies he’d told Laura Gibbs about his camera, his moorland walks, and his search for a student who’d been missing for thirty-one years.
I gave Healy a quick overview of everything he’d missed.
‘Shit,’ he said quietly. ‘You got any idea who this Beatrix Steards girl is?’
‘Only what I’ve read online. I’m waiting on her file.’
‘And Isaac Mills? Do we know anything else about him?’
‘Only that he’s an ex-cop and he says he works for Seiger and Sten.’
‘He told you his name at Black Gale and that turned out to be true. Why give you his name – knowing you’d go looking for him – and lie about where he worked?’
It was a good point, one I didn’t have an answer to. But something wasn’t right about this. I didn’t like how easily Mills had given up his name and what he did. What if him giving up his name, as well as the company he worked for, was bait?
What if he wanted me to come to him?
What if he knew I’d followed him today?
‘I need to look into him some more,’ I said. ‘And Seiger and Sten.’
‘I can look into them for you.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘I said I can do it, Raker.’
‘I know you can do it,’ I shot back, and this time I heard the sharpness in my voice, ‘but at the moment you’re hiding out in a hotel room trying to make sure neither of us goes to prison. So I think it’s best if you sit tight, don’t you?’
He didn’t respond this time.
‘Look, Healy, I don’t want it to be like this but –’
‘I just feel helpless,’ he said quietly.
I stayed silent, any anger vanishing instantly.
‘I don’t want to be here, hiding out in this dump; I want to be there, with you, working this case. This was my case. I spent two months collecting all that stuff you’ve got there, and now everything’s gone to shite.’ Even over the traffic noise, I could hear him clearing his chest, the emotion forming a ball in his throat. ‘Whatever I had before this in Devon, it wasn’t much, but it was a life. It was better than this.’
I couldn’t think what else to say to him, didn’t know how else to frame the same response I’d given him, over and over again, during the last three and a half years. There was a revisionism to his memories of living in Devon because, mostly, he’d absolutely hated it, the loneliness and isolation, the back-breaking manual work, the lack of interaction, and the fact that there was no returning to the police force, to the investigations that he’d loved. But he was right: Devon had been something; imperfect and solitary, but still a routine in which he’d found a measure of comfort.
A chime on my laptop brought me back to the present, and when I used the trackpad, I saw that the icon for my file drop was flashing in the top bar of the screen.
Kevin Quinn had delivered.
He’d sent me the file for the Beatrix Steards disappearance.
28
The missing persons file for Beatrix Steards looked every day of its thirty-one years, the scanned pages in the digital version duplicating the flaws of the paper original exactly: its tears, its marks, the way the typewriter produced imperfect letters – some black and crisp; others soft, undefined or barely there at all. The overriding poverty of the search was much easier to see, though: there were few clues, even fewer leads, and the whole case had begun stalling about two weeks after Beatrix vanished. It was hard to say if that was down to a lack of focus, a lack of care or a lack of ability – it may even have been a combination of all three – but it was there on the page, stark and undeniable, the last update of any significance added in October 1989.
The lead investigator was a DS called Stuart Smoulter, who – after a couple of phone calls – I discovered had died of a stroke in 2009, aged sixty-nine, which meant there was no way of mining his memories of the case. His work was solid, mechanical, a series of ticked boxes that had ultimately resulted in minimal forward movement. I was, though, able to confirm some of the details that Kevin Quinn had already provided me with: Beatrix Steards had been twenty-one at the time of her disappearance, she’d got a first in History at King’s College and had then stayed on to do a Politics postgrad in September 1986, and the night she went missing – 3 March 1987, the day before her birthday – she’d been at a house party in Lambeth. The last person to see her alive was a 22-year-old man called Adrian Vale, who Quinn had told me about over the phone, and who Patrick Perry had asked him about as well: in the middle of the file was an interview that Smoulter had conducted with Vale. I gave it a quick look but decided to leave a detailed read until the end, concentrating instead on trying to fill in as much of the background on Beatrix Steards as possible.
Smoulter didn’t offer much on her childhood, but I managed to fill the gaps I had using a combination of what he’d found out and what was written in the one article about Beatrix I’d discovered online. She was born in Hammersmith on 4 March 1965, had lived in Fulham and then further out in Woking, and although her parents, Dave and Mira Steards, weren’t around any more – they were killed in a car accident in 1990 – she had had, by all accounts, a happy, settled upbringing. In terms of geography, the details also seemed to tally: Beatrix had never been based anywhere except the south; certainly never in the north-west, where Patrick Perry lived. The two of them were around the same age at the time of Beatrix’s disappearance, but they’d lived out their lives in separate cities, two hundred miles apart.
The idea that they might have been romantically involved was one I couldn’t dismiss, but I put it on the back burner for now. Instead, I rang some old newspaper colleagues of Patrick’s, using numbers I found online, trying to get some sort of idea of when his interest in Beatrix Steards might have started. Could it have begun while he was still working at the Manchester Evening News? It was a theory that almost immediately got dismissed.
‘Why would he be interested in a girl who disappeared in London?’ his former editor asked me when I finally managed to track him down. ‘Pat ran plenty of stories past me in the time he was with us, but she wasn�
��t one of them. And even if she was, why would I ever publish it? Tragic as it sounds, we deal with news in Manchester.’
I spoke to a couple of other journalists who said the same thing, and then started trying to work another angle, cross-referencing King’s College courses at the time Beatrix vanished with ones offered at Manchester University, where Patrick had studied English, at the same point in history. It was slow, difficult work – both on the net and on the phone – because of the amount of time that had passed, and impossible to answer anything conclusively, but there was no hint of a collaboration or exchange programme between the two universities, no hint at all that Patrick and Beatrix may have moved in the same circles in their early twenties.
I tabbed back to the start of the file and looked at the photo of Beatrix Steards at the front. It was exactly the same as the one I’d seen already online, just a better-quality version. I zoomed in a little, trying to get a clearer sense of her face, of the colour of her eyes: they were light green, almost grey, and her mouth was turned up into a hint of a smile, framed perfectly between the two vertical lines of her bob. And then, on the right-hand side of her face, just below her eye, was what I’d thought might have been a mole, or perhaps some minor scarring. But, in fact, it was neither.
It was a birthmark, pale brown and oddly shaped.
Almost like a butterfly.
I picked up the phone to Ross again. It had only been a matter of hours since I’d last called him, asking if he’d ever heard the name Kevin Quinn, but he told me I could call when I needed, and he was stuck in traffic on the way home, anyway.
‘Can you remember when your mum and dad met?’ I asked him.
‘Mum said she was nineteen, so that would have made it …’ He stopped, trying to do the sums. ‘About 1986. They dated for four years and got married in July 1990.’
‘Your mum was from Italy originally, is that correct?’
‘Florence, yes.’
‘When did she move here?’
‘When she was fifteen.’
‘And her family moved from Italy to where?’
‘Liverpool.’
He was smart, so even if he didn’t know where the questions were going, he knew they were loaded. I was looking for reasons why Patrick might have headed south, even if it was only briefly, around 1986 or 1987. But if Francesca had been based in Liverpool, he would have been travelling back and forth to see her.
‘Did your dad ever mention a woman called Beatrix Steards to you?’
‘Who?’
‘Beatrix Steards. She was from London.’ I spelled out her name for him. ‘Maybe it was a friend of his, or a girlfriend. This would have been when Patrick was about twenty-two.’
‘When he was twenty-two, he was dating Mum.’
I looked at the wall of photographs; didn’t say anything.
‘Wait a second, are you wondering if Dad was carrying on with this woman behind Mum’s back?’ The thought seemed to rattle him, the confusion evident in his silence, but then he came back hard: ‘That never happened. Honestly, I’m telling you, Dad never spent time down south. His education was up here, he was working for a Manchester newspaper – he had no reason to be in London, ever. Plus, he’d only started dating Mum the year before. Why would he go off with someone else and come back and marry Mum? How would he have met this woman in the first place?’
They were both valid points, but people did all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, and made all sorts of connections. And, anyway, an affair wasn’t the extent of my thinking. I’d decided against voicing it in front of Ross – because if he struggled with the idea of his dad cheating, he would never contemplate something even worse – but could Patrick have had something to do with Beatrix Steards going missing?
Based on most of what I’d read and heard about Patrick Perry so far, the idea didn’t necessarily land, but then he’d lied to Laura Gibbs, and more importantly to his wife, about why he’d repeatedly headed out to the moors in those last few months, so was it really so hard to believe he might lie about this?
I thanked Ross, hung up and called Tori Gibbs.
‘You told me the other night what Laura said to you about Patrick,’ I started. ‘Did Laura ever say anything else to you about him? By that I mean what sort of person he was.’
‘You mean was he the cheating type?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Was he?’
Tori’s breath crackled in the phone. ‘She said she didn’t think so – she said his wife was a real beauty too, and they seemed devoted to one another – but then it’s weird, right? Heading out to the moors like that, but only when your wife isn’t home.’
‘Maybe he did it because that made most sense: when Francesca was home, he could spend time with her; when she wasn’t, he could spend time taking his photos.’
Except his camera didn’t work.
And Francesca had called his hobby an obsession.
So was her comment, as Ross believed, a bit of light-hearted fun? Or had she actually started to suspect her husband was up to something?
I heard Tori moving. ‘I mean, anything’s possible.’ A door opening and closing and then the sound of paper – a file maybe, or a pad. ‘I’m just flicking through my notes here …’ Another pause. ‘After they all disappeared, I tried writing down everything I could remember Laura saying about the neighbours.’
I brought my own pad towards me.
‘To be honest, though, most of it’s pretty good.’ She sounded disappointed, but it wasn’t surprising: the fact that everyone in Black Gale had got on, and that the neighbours had all liked each other, had been clear from the start. ‘She said Patrick was handsome, charming, funny – basically, she said he was the type you could imagine women dropping their knickers for, and after Laura kept seeing him going out on to the moors, we talked about whether he could be having his end away. I said to her it sounded like it had all the hallmarks of an affair, but I’ve written that Laura said – and I quote – “If Patrick was having an affair, I bet it’s weighing heavy on his conscience.” It’s definitely possible that I’ve massively paraphrased that, because I wrote this down at least a month after Halloween, but even if the words aren’t right, the sentiment is. Patrick might have been having an affair, but whatever pleasure he got from it would have been offset against the guilt he felt at cheating on Francesca.’
I looked at the photograph of Patrick I had on the wall.
‘Do you think he was having an affair?’ Tori asked me.
It was still hard to say for sure, but I had to consider it, just as I had to consider something else: that whatever happened to Beatrix Steards in 1987 had eventually had a knock-on effect in Black Gale two and a half years ago; that whatever he’d been looking for in her case, he’d found.
And it was the reason he disappeared that night.
And the reason eight others did too.
29
The interview with Adrian Vale, the main suspect in Beatrix Steards’s disappearance, took place with DS Smoulter in Walworth on 6 March 1987, two days after Beatrix was reported missing by two friends she shared a fifth-floor flat with in Bermondsey.
He’d been six months older than Beatrix and was doing the same postgrad in Politics as her. In total, there had been six people taking the course, and while Vale stated in his interview with Smoulter that only Beatrix and another student, Robert Zaid, had actually known each other before the start of the year – Beatrix and Zaid had done the same History degree – he said that all the students had got to know each other relatively quickly after the postgrad course began in September 1986. They weren’t best friends necessarily, Vale said, but they knew each other quite well. That meant that, when Beatrix had left the house party in Lambeth at around 11.45 p.m. on 3 March, and she’d come across Adrian Vale on the steps outside, smoking, they’d had a short conversation.
SMOULTER: What was the conversation about?
VALE: We talked about the course, about some mutual f
riends, and then I think we just talked about movies. She asked me if I’d seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and I said I hadn’t seen it yet, but I had seen The Fly. She joked that she didn’t have the stomach for that one, and I told her she should definitely go to see it because the special effects –
SMOULTER: Okay. What else?
VALE: That was it, really.
SMOULTER: That was literally all you talked about?
VALE: Yes.
SMOULTER: Which friends did you discuss?
VALE: Uh. I think we mentioned Robert.
SMOULTER: That’s Robert Zaid?
VALE: Yes.
SMOULTER: He was the one who did the same History course as Beatrix – is that right?
VALE: That’s right, yes.
SMOULTER: Anything else?
VALE: No. Like I say, it was a fairly short conversation. Maybe five minutes. Perhaps ten.
SMOULTER: Five or ten?
VALE: Uh … closer to ten, I guess.
It was clear from the transcript that Smoulter’s alarm was going off: he didn’t like Vale, maybe saw something in his manner that put him on edge, so a lot of his questioning was hostile. Yet even though Smoulter had come straight out the gate and piled into Vale, Vale had remained polite, his answers consistent and rational, and he rarely appeared evasive.
SMOULTER: How did she seem?
VALE: Seem?
SMOULTER: When she left the party. Was she drunk? Was she upset? Did it look like she’d been crying?
VALE: No, not really. She seemed fine.
SMOULTER: So you’re saying she wasn’t drunk?
VALE: If she was, it didn’t seem like it.
SMOULTER: Had you seen her drinking that night?
VALE: Yes. Everyone was drinking. It was a party full of students. That’s what most students do.
