by Tim Weaver
A soft moan.
He re-emerged, dragging something.
The shotgun was in one hand; his other was clamped on to the back of a shirt collar. It was another man, blindfolded. As Mills hauled him out of the blackness of the kitchen, the man made a wordless noise like a wounded animal. I could see blood on his clothes, understood now how it had ended up on Mills’s knuckles – and then Mills released his grip and the man rolled, slumping sideways.
‘The thing that scares you,’ Mills said, using his foot to turn the man on to his back, ‘is the thought of your work being cut short. All that the missing bring to your life, the comfort you find in the search, the way they hauled you free of your grief and helped you survive. It keeps you sane. Being forced to stop would be worse than any bullet. Being contained, walled in, being in a situation where you had no control over your life, where you have no agency any more and, worse, no freedom, it would kill you. So you want to know what your pressure point is, Raker?’
At my feet, the man moaned again, his beard specked with saliva, his lip split, his shaved scalp matted with blood.
‘It’s your fear of going to prison.’
36
On the floor, Healy tried to move.
His wrists were tied in front of him. The cut above his eyebrow had reopened. His nose looked busted, the straight line of the bridge puffy, the skin purple where he’d been struck. But while he was obviously dazed and half-conscious, his stunted actions and soft, continual moaning was coming from something more than just his injuries.
He’d been drugged too.
He must have fought, which was exactly why Mills had been forced to give him a sedative: he’d been surprised by Healy, by his will to survive, to resist. As I dropped to my haunches, placing a hand against Healy’s arm, I felt him flinch. When I told him it was me, there was a fractional delay, and then he frowned and started repeating my name. His voice crackled with the pain of his injuries and the first swells of a fever.
I looked up at Isaac Mills.
‘You need to stop,’ he said again.
‘Where are they?’
‘Who?’
I stood up again, facing him down.
‘The villagers. The people from Black Gale.’
He sighed, closing his eyes for a second.
‘Just tell me what happened to them.’
Mills shook his head, as if he were dealing with a child, and then he turned the shotgun – moving it in an arc – so that the barrel was pointed at Healy’s chest.
‘Haven’t you been listening to me, Raker?’
‘Was it to do with what Patrick Perry was looking into?’
Mills didn’t respond.
‘Was it something to do with Beatrix Steards?’
This time, he glanced at the phone, still recording our conversation from the living-room table, and then – when his eyes switched back to me – something was in them, something different: a hint of definition, as if they’d coloured at the mention of Beatrix Steards’s name.
‘Mills?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Was it something to do with Beatrix?’
‘Shut your mouth.’
I watched him for a second, but whatever had been in his eyes was gone now. I tried a different angle: ‘Why is Randolph and Emiline’s camper van missing?’
He broke into a smile this time.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘You,’ he said. ‘You’re what’s funny. “Where’s the camper van?” What a total waste of fucking time.’
That stopped me – and he could see it.
‘I had it crushed.’
I frowned. ‘What?’
‘The camper van. It’s history. No one will ever find it.’
‘Why would you –’
‘No,’ he said, cutting me off, his voice harsher than ever. ‘No more questions. This is how it’s going to play out from here on in, okay?’ Once more I wondered if he was sick, his nature – his actions, his expression and his voice – so inconsistent. ‘You’re going to go back to London, and anything you’ve got squirrelled away down there on Black Gale, any notes you’ve made about anything, you’re going to rip up and flush away. Before that, and after I’m gone, you’re going to set up a nice little fire in the chimney over there and burn all the shit that was on the wall as well – every last scrap of paper. I want this place so spotlessly clean, so free of any reminders of the digging around that you and your Irish friend on the floor have been doing, that it’ll be like you were never here.’ He glanced at Healy, on his side now in a foetal position, still moaning gently, and then used the toe of a boot to prod him in the ribs. ‘You’d better make that clear to Seamus here because, judging by the trouble he gave me in Leeds tonight, he obviously has a hard time understanding basic English.’
He returned his gaze to me.
‘Are you following me so far, Raker?’
I just stared at him.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you?’
I nodded.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Good. So you’re going to do all of that, and you’re never going to ask another question about Black Gale again, ever, or things start going wrong for you. Because I will start digging around in your past cases and find all the shit I know you covered up, all the lies I bet you’ve told the cops, and then I will call the police, and I will do the same with Connor McCaskell, and I will tell them everything. I’ll tell them you illegally obtained the paperwork from this case as well – an open investigation – which will, in turn, compromise your sources and end with them in the dock too. And who knows? Just because I can, I might even throw in the fact that you hit a deer and failed to report it.’ He used his boot again, pressing down at the side of Healy’s head, crushing his face into the floor. When I moved, automatically trying to stop him, he swivelled the shotgun around and pushed the barrel into my chest. Its weight rocked me back. ‘Don’t think that I won’t do it. Even after everything I’ve said, don’t think I won’t cut you down. If it’s me or you, you’d better believe it’ll be you that goes in the ground first, whether that means some journalist sniffing around me or not.’ He prodded my chest with the barrel again. ‘Step back.’
I did as he asked.
As he released his foot from Healy’s face, he turned to me again, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. ‘You’re a clever bastard, you know that, Raker? I’ve gained a new appreciation for you since yesterday. All the moves you’ve been making, they’re moves I’d have made, or moves I maybe wouldn’t have even thought of. Sending Bryan here down to Leeds, now that was a smart idea.’
‘Obviously not smart enough.’
‘Well, everyone’s a genius in hindsight,’ he said, shrugging, and something moved across his face, brief, ephemeral, like the flicker of a candle flame. ‘The year before I left Lancashire Constabulary – this would have been October, November 2010 – I landed this case: a killing in Preston. It was a family of four: Dad, Mum, son of nine, daughter of eleven. I walked in there and that place was like a bloodbath. In fifteen years as a cop, I’d never seen anything like it. The anger of the killer – it was fucking scary. You think you’ve seen everything, you think you’ve pushed it all so far down that nothing will ever bother you again, but it does. That family, they all got to me so much, I was seeing crime-scene pictures of the kids every time I blinked.’
I watched him, confused now.
Why was he telling me this?
‘When I think back,’ he continued, his voice humming with the after-effects, even now, of what had been left behind of that family, ‘turning up there, having to process that, it was probably the moment I realized I was done. Cops who go on for ever, seeing shit like that all the time, I admire their resilience, but that wasn’t me. I wasn’t being paid enough to lie there awake every night, staring into the dark, seeing images of a nine-year-old’s brains up the walls and his guts on the bed sheets.’
‘But what you’re doing now is better?’
/>
‘I guess it’s easy to leave your principles at the door when the money’s good.’ He smiled, but there was no humour in it. ‘Anyway, a couple of days in, a case comes up on the computer that bears a resemblance to mine. I’m thinking to myself, “Could they be connected? Could this be the same killer?” This one was down in London, though – in New Cross.’ He was eyeing me, seeing if I’d caught up with him – and I had. I knew exactly where this was going now, and as it hit home, the entire room felt like it was spinning. ‘I figured it was worth a closer look,’ Mills went on, ‘so I got one of my team to call up the detective who was handling the case and they asked him about it, to see if we could help each other, but he just shut us down. He was fucking rude. He told my DC that our cases were different, they happened miles apart, that there weren’t enough similarities, that he didn’t have time to go chasing false leads and false hope. I mean, he was right, because in the end, they weren’t connected, but I had a family of four and he had a family of three: a mum and her twin daughters. You can see why I got someone to call him.’
We looked at each other, the room silent.
The detective that Mills’s team had talked to had been Healy. The mother and her twin daughters had been the case that had destroyed his life. His marriage. His career. It was the case that had set Healy on the road to a breakdown, to homelessness, a heart attack, to perpetual thoughts of suicide – until, eventually, he’d faked his own death and started again in Devon. That case was the reason he’d become Bryan Kennedy.
And Mills had figured it out.
Maybe not everything, but enough.
‘I highly doubt if he would even remember that call,’ Mills said, looking at the prone figure on the floor. ‘He was so consumed by that case, and we only ever talked to him on the phone.’ That explained why Healy had never mentioned knowing Mills when his name had come up: not only because the call from Mills’s team had happened almost a decade ago, but because it came in the midst of a search for a child killer, a search that was going nowhere, that remained unsolved for over three years, and that Healy was being crushed under the weight of, even back then. He didn’t know Mills. He barely recalled anything from that period except loss.
Mills’s gaze came back to me.
‘Anyway,’ he said, and stopped again.
And then something weird happened.
‘I don’t know exactly what my point is.’ His eyes fixed on mine, and I knew straight away it was a lie. He knew exactly what his point was. All of this, the whole account of how he’d landed the murder of the family in Preston, had been a prelude, a lead-in to the revelation that he knew it was Colm Healy lying on the floor between us, not Bryan Kennedy, and that if I ever asked another question about Black Gale, if I pinned another piece of paper to a wall, he wouldn’t only dig into my cases and expose my sources, he would tell the world that Healy wasn’t dead. I would lose my freedom, my cases, my oxygen.
I would go to prison.
‘That hack McCaskell is on to something,’ he said, his words not matching his eyes again, his voice not aligning with his expression, ‘and whoever this is lying here – whatever his actual name, because I haven’t been able to find this Bryan Kennedy anywhere – he’s clearly important enough to land you in trouble, which is why I’m guessing McCaskell is so interested in him.’
I frowned. Why was he pretending he didn’t know Healy’s real name?
‘Don’t come back here again, Raker,’ he said, stepping around Healy and going to the table. He stopped, looking down at the mobile phone. ‘As soon as the sun is up, you leave. I don’t want to hear the words “Black Gale” coming out of your mouth – not now, not ever. I don’t want you asking questions about the people who lived there, their lives, their histories, what they used to like, what they didn’t. Nothing. I don’t give a shit what you tell the families, what excuse you make for not carrying on with the search, but you’re going to tell them it’s over, and make it sound convincing, and then you’re going to forget you ever came here. Because if you don’t, I promise you this: I’ll go looking for Bryan Kennedy, and I’ll find out who he really is, and one way or another, I’ll take the freedom from both of you.’
I frowned at him, thrown, misled. ‘Why are you –’
But he shook his head at me.
I stopped, my sentence half-finished.
‘Why am I what?’ he fired back, his voice sharp, but this time I could see it for exactly what it was. Not a game. Not a sickness either.
An act.
An act for whoever was listening to us.
‘How much simpler do I have to make it for you?’ he said. ‘Get rid of what’s left in here, make the phone calls to the family, then go home.’
He watched me for a moment, and then his eyes went to Healy, lying on the floor a few feet from me: still, except for the rasp of his breath.
I glanced down at him myself.
Blood had formed in a pool under his cheek.
When I looked up again, Mills had the phone in his hand and was at the door, opening it up. We were still being listened to, the numbers still ticking over on the display. But now he held up the mobile and gave me a single nod of the head.
He was saying, You’re right.
This whole thing was a performance.
‘Don’t make me come back for you, Raker.’
He lingered in the doorway, his eyes on mine.
And then he headed into the night.
37
I stood there, eyes on the blackness of the doorway, trying to figure out what had just happened. And then Healy moaned softly, barely more than a whimper – as faint as the wind at the windows of the cottage – and I snapped back into focus.
Reaching down, I slid my hands under his arms, removed his blindfold, and tried to hoist him to his feet. He was a dead weight. He moaned again, one of his eyes twitched open and he started trying to say my name. The more he tried to say it, the less coherent his speech became, until he gave up altogether. Blood had begun to clot inside his nose, thick and gummy, and it had dried to one side of his face, a streak of it, like the roots of a plant creeping out from the corner of his mouth.
I walked him over to the sofa.
He slumped sideways, his head hitting one of the cushions, and every part of him seemed to exhale, his whole body contracting as if every last breath had escaped. A second later, though, he shifted again, eyelids flickering, body tilting as he tried to get a sense of where I was in the room. I dropped to my haunches at his side, and after a second he zeroed in on me, his eyes glazed, and he said, ‘I’m sorry, Raker.’
‘It’s okay.’
He blinked.
‘Do you know what sedative Mills gave you?’
‘No,’ he managed, the noise like an expiration.
Even if he’d known, it wasn’t going to make much difference: the best thing he could do now was lie here and let it wear off. I went to the kitchen, filled a glass with water and then started searching through the cupboards for a first-aid kit. Even if I couldn’t do anything about the sedative, I could try to repair the damage to his face.
As I searched, I felt a moment of déjà vu, a second where Healy and I were in the farmhouse at Black Gale, after we’d hit the deer out on the road, and I’d been trying to find a first-aid kit for the cuts on his face. The thought of that, of being in the village, of being in the middle of a case that I didn’t want to let go of, sent a spike of anger through the centre of my chest. The anger was for Mills, for the people he worked for, the we he talked about when he baited me with the idea of going after Annabel – but as I looked at the empty wall, at the paper on the floor, I realized that wasn’t all of it.
I felt anger for Healy too.
I’d helped him start again – to construct a new life, however simple it might have been – because I’d believed, at the time, it was the right thing to do. But there hadn’t been many days since when – in my most unguarded moments – I hadn’t wondered if it might have
been easier to let him destroy himself.
Because the lies I told for him had just cost me a case.
And it had cost nine people even more than that.
By the time I returned to the living room, he was asleep, breath rasping in his throat, bubbles of snot and blood forming at his nose. I took a moment to clear my head, to try and douse some of the anger, and popped open the lid of the first-aid kit.
Slowly, I started to clean him up.
He reacted a couple of times, wincing – even in his sleep – as I wiped the blood from the bridge of his nose, from the cut at his eyebrow which needed re-dressing. His nose wasn’t broken, but he’d been punched there and a puffy ridge of purple had already formed in the corner of one of his eye sockets. When I was done, I used a mirror inside the lid of the first-aid kit to examine my own face, the cut on my right cheek from where Mills had jammed the shotgun, the bruising that had already begun to colour at its edges. I cleaned it but didn’t dress it for now, and then packed everything away again.
When I was done, I looked over at the doorway again.
Who had been listening to Mills and me on the mobile phone? Was it Jacob Pierce? Someone else at Seiger and Sten? Or did this have nothing to do with the legal firm at all? It was obvious that Mills had come here with at least one other person, because at the same time he was leading me out to the barns, someone had been going through the cottage – so why hadn’t that person stayed behind? Why listen on speakerphone?
I could think of only two reasons.
They didn’t want me to ID them.
And they didn’t fully trust Mills.
I felt a spark of energy at the thought of the second, even as I looked at what was left of my casework, and it only burned stronger when I remembered how Mills had been throughout our conversation: violent in words and actions, but not in the way he’d looked at me. Not in the nod of his head at the end. Not in the act he’d put on for whoever had been listening.
