No One Home

by Tim Weaver

  Jo changed direction.

  ‘You ever heard the name Gabriel Wilzon, Adrian?’

  Vale frowned. ‘Who?’

  ‘Gabriel Wilzon – that’s Wilzon with a zee.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Never. Why?’

  She studied him for a moment. The eyes were normally where it began to break down first, where the rifts and fractures of a lie were initially exposed. But Vale’s eyes hardly strayed from hers at all and were still sheened with moisture from where he’d got emotional talking about Martina. Jo pressed him again: ‘Have you ever heard of the Star Inn?’

  ‘Is that a hotel?’

  ‘A motel. It’s out in West Hollywood.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, never.’

  ‘You ever spend any time out that way?’

  ‘In West Hollywood?’ He glanced at his mother, who appeared as puzzled as he was. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Never. I can’t remember the last time I went that far across town.’

  ‘You weren’t there on the weekend of 20th and 21st of July?’

  He frowned again. ‘No.’

  ‘Do you remember where you were?’

  ‘Two weeks ago?’ He paused, thinking. ‘I was probably just hanging out here. I haven’t done much since I’ve been home. The last semester at Stanford was pretty intense, so I’ve been taking it easy. Do you remember what we did that day, Ma?’

  ‘Days,’ Jo corrected. ‘Saturday and Sunday.’

  Valeria’s expression mirrored her son’s.

  Jo moved on.

  ‘You used to work at Caraca BuildIt, right?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Vale replied.

  ‘Any chance you might have somehow got access to a maroon VW Quantum that belongs to the company in the time since you got back for the summer break?’

  He looked at her like she was joking with him.

  ‘I don’t work there any more,’ he said. ‘I haven’t worked there since I went to Stanford.’ He was frowning again, genuinely confused. ‘I haven’t seen Mr Caraca for a couple of years, so I don’t know how he does it now – but back when I was there, he was the only one who ever had the keys to the garage where all the vehicles were left.’

  ‘What about Donald Klein? Does that name mean anything to you?’

  ‘No,’ he replied again. ‘Nothing. Who is he?’

  ‘You ever been to Runyon Canyon Park?’

  This time, he looked frustrated at the constant swerving, at the lack of any sort of explanation. ‘Never been there in my life,’ he said, his voice tight. ‘Not even once.’

  At the table, Valeria was starting to look pale, clearly worried that her son had got himself into some sort of trouble; but there was anger as well, as palpable as the heat in the living room, her eyes narrowed and brow creased. She was ready to defend her son if it came to it, to fight for him. It was an instinct Jo identified with instantly.

  I need to calm this down.

  Jo raised the flat of her hand. ‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ she lied, trying to head things off. She had to be careful. If she pushed too hard, this was exactly the sort of thing that could end up on Hayesfield’s desk. ‘Basically, it appears as if Martina purchased a particularly strong batch of crack cocaine and suffered a heart attack as a result of it, and we’re still trying to locate the person who sold her those drugs last year.’ She watched to see if the lie would divert them away from the questions she’d asked. Both of them, Vale and his mother, seemed to slump, their faces smoothing out, the fire in their cheeks fading, and then the full horror of Martina’s death – her heart attack; the fact she’d become another statistic in the city’s crack epidemic – hit home, and they both seemed to deflate. Valeria leaned across the table. Vale collapsed into the couch.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ she said, addressing the both of them, but keeping her gaze on Vale. He glanced at her, blinked again, and then sat up, wiping his eyes.

  ‘I guess finding out that she died in that way …’ he said quietly, embarrassed. And then his words dissolved – and a tear escaped, tracing a path along his cheek.

  41

  I looked at the clothes and the shoes in the second box.

  The wallets. The purses.

  The nine phones.

  A heaviness settled on me, a sinking feeling that I couldn’t cast off as I realized what it meant: it was highly unlikely I was looking for nine missing people any more.

  I was looking for nine dead bodies.

  Deep down, I’d always feared that would be the case but it didn’t make it any easier to swallow. I rubbed my eyes, the adrenalin washing out of me, the sorrow of a doomed search, and then – at the very periphery of my vision – I saw the other box of clothes that I’d already opened. Was it worse than I thought?

  Were there even more missing people?

  Grabbing my phone – a cheap replacement for the one that Mills and his accomplice had stolen from me at the cottage – I quickly took as many photos as I could. I started with the clothes, then the boxes, then the money that Jacob Pierce had locked away in here. After I was done I packed everything up again, trying to return it in the vague order in which I’d pulled it out. The checked shirt belonging to Chris Gibbs. A T-shirt with the poster for The Shining printed on it, belonging to Mark. The brown cords that Randolph Solomon had arrived in. John Davey’s blazer. Patrick’s green V-neck sweater. Emiline Wilson’s red-and-blue dress and the floral one that Freda Davey had been wearing. There was a small tube of painkillers too that Freda must have brought with her, her name printed in tiny letters on the side of it. In all that had happened, in the frantic search for answers, it was easy to forget that, a few months before she vanished, she’d found out that her cancer had come back.

  The Black Gale residents’ phones were as useless as the iPad I’d found in the first box, destroyed in the same way. As I placed them back into the container, I tried to imagine why Pierce, or Mills, or whoever else was involved, kept everything hidden here and hadn’t just dumped it all somewhere remote. But then I started to see a kind of sense in it: if it was all in here, it would likely never get found.

  If everything was left out there somewhere, it might.

  Clothes took years to degrade. Nylon and leather lasted forty years, the Lycra in the exercise gear upwards of a hundred. They wouldn’t just disappear, not like human beings. We decayed. We atomized, sometimes – with the right conditions – in a matter of weeks. If a body was a skeleton, reduced to a series of disconnected parts over time, it became much harder to identify. If it was still clothed, and if those clothes matched the last description of what a missing person had been wearing, it opened up a pathway back to the disappearance, possibly to the suspect involved in taking them, and combined with DNA that might have been left in threads, on collars, on sleeves, investigators were suddenly armed. Keep the clothes, however, and another source of trace evidence was secured. Same with the phones: the batteries were gone, the SIM cards too, but a mobile still carried a model number, an IMEI barcode printed on the inside, and that made it possible to trace ownership. The wallets had driving licences, and bank cards, personal effects, and it all remained a risk if left out in the open.

  I thought of Mills, of his reasons for giving me the key, and my mind spooled all the way back to the cottage, to when he’d had a shotgun pointed at me. He’d told me the story about the family of four who’d been murdered. I’d thought it was because he wanted to let me know that he knew who Healy was, and maybe that was part of the reason. But now I was starting to wonder if that wasn’t just secondary to something else: perhaps he was telling me he had a conscience; perhaps he was telling me that no amount of money was quite enough to suppress his instincts as an investigator, as someone who intuitively cared for victims. He’d cared for that family, he’d cared for the shop owner he’d saved from being shot, he cared for the girlfriend I’d seen him with and her two kids, and now he cared about the lost lives hidden in these boxes. That made me think he’d only come ac
ross this room recently. It made me think that Pierce had been keeping him out of the loop, telling him only what he needed to know, and that the money Mills had been earning had been enough for him to ignore some of the things that didn’t add up or sit right with him. But, eventually, Mills had got curious, and somehow he’d ended up here. And once he saw this place, it flipped a switch.

  I stopped.

  I’d been thinking so much about Mills, I’d almost missed something else entirely. It was rolled up in the green sweater belonging to Patrick Perry and had remained hidden there, even when I’d got the sweater out and set it down. But as I returned it the box, I felt it shift and slide towards me.

  I unwrapped the jumper.

  Inside was a Dictaphone.

  42

  The Dictaphone was digital, but it was an old model, large and cumbersome, and I immediately thought of Patrick Perry, of his years as a journalist, and then his weeks and months spent looking into the vanishing of Beatrix Steards. Had this been his when he’d still been at the Manchester Evening News? It was scuffed at the edges, suggesting it had seen a lot of mileage, and when I cycled through the folders on the display, I saw that almost all of them had been used, and each contained a recording. I eyed the device and considered the fact that it was wrapped in a piece of his clothing. The police had clearly never realized the Dictaphone existed, otherwise it would have been mentioned somewhere in the investigation. So either Patrick took it with him on the night of the disappearance – or someone went back to the village for it afterwards. But why?

  I turned it over.

  Something was written, in black pen, on the back.

  G76984Z.

  There was something about the sequence – in particular, the numbers – that got my attention, but I couldn’t think what, and didn’t have the time to waste here trying to figure it out. Instead, I went to the top of the steps, looking out into Pierce’s office, making sure I was still alone, and then used the volume wheel on the side to push the sound down.

  I pressed Play.

  ‘Okay. Are you ready to start?’

  It was a male voice with a Mancunian accent.

  ‘Yes, I’m ready.’

  A female, also Mancunian.

  ‘Did they explain to you about the online story?’

  ‘Yes. They said it would be posted later.’

  ‘That’s right. I’m just an old hack set in my ways but, as I understand it, they will post an edited version of this interview on to the website at the same time as the printed version goes out. That means I just need to do a very brief introduction …’

  ‘Okay.’

  There was a second’s pause.

  ‘I’m Patrick Perry, senior reporter for the Manchester Evening News and I’m here with Coralie McEwan, former girlfriend of city council leader Tony Eckhart.’

  Straight away, I recognized the name of the woman: she was the mistress of the city councilman who’d been caught siphoning off public funds back in the 1990s. Patrick had hung a framed copy of the front-page story he’d written about this on his study wall.

  ‘Thank you for talking to me, Coralie.’

  I listened for a minute or so and then switched to the next file, and the next, moving through them as fast as I could, constantly pausing to make sure the office was still silent, aware that the longer I stayed here, the more I put myself at risk. But, at the same time, it was hard not to listen. I realized I hadn’t heard Patrick speak before, so as he interviewed local politicians, victims of crime, protagonists in stories he’d written in his time as a reporter, it was a chance finally to match a voice to the person I’d read about and had described to me. I’d studied his life so closely and knew so much about him now that I found myself surprised at how he sounded, different from how I imagined, his voice deeper than Ross’s, and scratchier, as if he had once been a smoker. But compelling as it was to hear him talk, as I kept going – one file after the next – I quickly began to realize I was no closer to understanding what possible interest any of this could hold for Jacob Pierce, or why the Dictaphone was in here.

  But then I hit the second-from-last file.

  The date of the recording flashed up every time I switched folders, and all of the other interviews had predated the point at which Patrick was made redundant in 2010. All of them, except this one and the next.

  This one had been recorded on 15 October 2015.

  Sixteen days before he and the others disappeared.

  ‘Okay. We’re recording now. You asked me not to write anything down, so getting everything on tape is the next best way for me to remember all that I need to. Not being able to take notes … it just makes it harder to remember important details, that’s all, and details are the way you make progress with stuff like this. So just talk to me like you did all the other times we’ve met and don’t worry about the Dictaphone. Everything else on here was recorded years ago, when I was still at the newspaper, so what we talk about will be safe. This thing’s just been gathering dust until now …’

  For a moment, there wasn’t any response. I could hear movement – the squeak of a sofa, the rustle of clothes, the distant whine of the wind at a window somewhere – and, briefly, became worried it wasn’t just coming from the tape but from the office too. I stopped the recording and inched into the corridor, looking into reception, towards the entrance. Nothing had changed. No one was here.

  But I was still on edge.

  I stayed where I was, in sight of the entrance, and pressed Play again.

  ‘Okay, so you want me to just tell you what I remember?’

  A woman.

  ‘Exactly,’ Patrick replied.

  ‘I guess I remember being surprised her name was Beatrix.’

  I froze, eyes fixed on the Dictaphone now.

  ‘You don’t think it suited her?’

  ‘It wasn’t that.’

  ‘So what was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. She just never seemed like a Beatrix to me.’

  There was a long pause, peripheral sounds fading in again, the clink of a mug being put down.

  ‘What else do you remember thinking?’

  ‘It was all such a long time ago.’ The woman paused for a moment and I heard her take a long breath, the sound of it heavy, almost uneasy. ‘I don’t … I just …’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Patrick said. ‘Take a minute if you need to.’

  In the quiet that followed, I tried to imagine who Patrick was interviewing. Her voice gave few clues. She was from the south somewhere, but there was a generic quality to her inflection that made it hard to be more specific. It was even hard to put an age on her – her voice was smooth, her speech patterns unblemished. The lack of a northern accent immediately discounted the idea of it being one of the women from the village: Freda Davey had been born in Leeds, Emiline Wilson was brought up in Kendal and Laura Gibbs in York, while Francesca Perry hadn’t moved to the UK until she was fifteen – and, according to Ross, had never lost her Italian accent.

  ‘Sorry,’ the woman said, ‘it’s still so hard to talk about.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Patrick replied. ‘So you saw Beatrix’s picture in the media?’

  ‘Yes. In the newspaper.’

  ‘After she was reported missing in 1987?’

  ‘Yes. She was on page four of the Mail. I remember that.’

  ‘How did you know it was her?’

  ‘If you look at photos of her, she has a birthmark on the right side of her face, on her cheek, just below her eye. It’s small and quite pale – but it’s very distinctive.’

  ‘You mean the shape of it?’

  ‘Yes. I always thought it looked like butterfly wings.’

  I’d thought the same thing.

  I remembered the birthmark. I remembered the light green, almost grey colour of Beatrix’s eyes in the photograph of her, how her mouth had been turned up in the merest hint of a smile, her slim build, her short, dark bob.

  ‘How did it feel when you saw her in
the paper?’

  ‘I felt,’ the woman started, but then stopped again. ‘I don’t know. I guess I felt surprised to start with. And then when I was definitely sure that it was her, I felt shocked, and a terrible sense of guilt. I think it was that, more than anything. Guilt is such a dreadful burden to carry.’

  ‘What did you feel guilty about?’

  ‘It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’ the woman said, although there was no malice in her voice, no disdain. ‘I did an awful thing to Beatrix – an awful, terrible thing.’

  Absolute silence.

  On the tape.

  In the office.

  ‘I hurt her,’ the woman said, her words breaking up, ‘and then I betrayed her, and then – when it was finally over – I buried her in the deepest hole I could find.’

  43

  I buried her in the deepest hole I could find.

  I was listening to Beatrix Steards’s killer.

  ‘Is there any part of you now that thinks what you did back then might have been justified?’ Patrick asked, the twang of his Mancunian accent pulling my thoughts back into focus. ‘It’s easier sometimes to look at decisions we’ve made –’

  ‘No.’

  The woman cut him off, her answer unambiguous, but, once again, there was no aggression in her tone, no sense that she was shouting Patrick down, admonishing him, even correcting him.

  ‘Not a single part of you thinks there was any justification for –’

  ‘No,’ she repeated, cutting him short again. ‘Not a single part.’