No One Home

by Tim Weaver

  I rewound the recording, so I could listen again. Patrick’s question had been so jarring, I almost didn’t process it properly the first time: how could he ask if there was a justification for murder?

  ‘I’ve tried to forget,’ the woman continued, ‘but there’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think of what I did. My choices are like a disease eating away at me –’

  Suddenly, the woman stopped talking.

  I expected Patrick to follow up on it, to ask her what the matter was, why she’d stopped, but instead – quietly, but audibly – there was a noise in the background of the interview. It took me a split second to work out what it was: a door opening.

  ‘Uh, sorry, have you booked this room?’

  Another male voice.

  ‘I didn’t realize you had to,’ Patrick replied.

  ‘I’m afraid you do. At reception.’

  ‘Oh, I apologize. Just give us a second.’

  The door closed again.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Patrick muttered. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘I’m trying to get a sense of what went on, of what you did and how it happened, but it’s so complicated. You can’t come to me, I can’t go to you, if anyone at Black Gale sees me with you, they’re going to start to ask me questions, and that’s exactly what you don’t want to happen.’ A long, frustrated pause. ‘I thought coming to the club would be a good idea on a day like this. I mean, look at the weather: who’s going to come here today to play golf? But even here, it’s …’

  He stopped.

  They were at a golf club somewhere, in a reception room. A place that would raise no questions for Patrick and no questions for the woman.

  ‘I should never have asked for your help,’ she said.

  ‘It’s fine. I want to help you.’

  ‘It’s wrong to involve you.’

  ‘It’s not wrong, it’s just complicated.’

  More silence. As the recording whirred on, backed by nothing but the sound of rain against the windows, I tried to imagine what was going on and where this fitted in.

  ‘I’m going to have a think about –’

  Patrick turned the recording off.

  I stared at the Dictaphone, watching as the numbers halted and reset again. A split second later, the next recording – the forty-third and final one – came to life.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Patrick again. It was dated 29 October – two days before the Halloween dinner – and the background noise was different this time: no rain, none of the compressed sound that came with recording inside a room. I could hear birds, the rustle of trees, and yet they were still somehow subdued.

  And then I realized why.

  They were in a car.

  ‘I’m fine,’ the woman said. ‘You?’

  Patrick sighed. ‘I was coming out of the house yesterday, with this useless bloody camera, ready to walk down here to meet you, and then Fran got back early from work and started asking me what I was doing.’ The wind picked up outside the car. ‘I hate all the lies.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. I understand why. I just …’

  He didn’t finish his sentence.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ the woman said.

  ‘It’s fine. I want to help you.’

  ‘I didn’t want it to be like this.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ he repeated. ‘Honestly. Let’s talk about what I’ve found out.’

  ‘All right. If you’re sure.’

  More background noise: birds, the very faint drone of a plane.

  ‘Let’s go back to the start.’

  ‘Okay,’ the woman responded nervously. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Let’s talk about Adrian Vale.’

  Dead Ends

  1985

  Los Angeles | Monday 5 August

  With the traffic, Jo didn’t get home till just after eight.

  Ethan was already asleep, the sheets twisted around him. She leaned into the crib, brushed her son’s hair away from his face and kissed him gently, before padding back through to the kitchen where Ira was serving up dinner.

  As they ate, she asked him what they’d got up to and Ira said he’d taken Ethan to the beach. Jo felt a pang of jealousy as she listened, at missing out again, at the things Ethan had said that had made Ira roar with laughter, at the fact that – while the two most important people in her life were building sandcastles – she was eating shit from Hayesfield about a minor admin error she’d made on a log sheet; that, while Ira and Ethan were having ice cream, she was talking to a grieving family about the corpse on State Route 39; and that, while there was a water fight going on in her backyard, Jo was sitting in Adrian Vale’s house, watching him cry, realizing she’d made a big mistake.

  It was a mistake that had only got worse afterwards.

  Once she’d left the Vales’, she’d driven her department-issue Caprice back to the station as the keys for her Oldsmobile were in the top drawer of her desk. Inside, the changeover had already happened, day shift to night shift, briefings still taking place at the tables and in meeting rooms. The dominant conversation had been at the far end, where the Night Stalker task force were discussing a .25-calibre revolver used in the last attack in Sun Valley.

  She’d slid in at her desk and found a xeroxed page sitting on her keyboard: it was the naked July model from a Pirelli calendar that hung in the kitchen – a calendar she’d told a couple of the detectives that she hated, that she objected to, and that she wanted taken down. Above the model, someone had drawn a speech bubble.

  It had said, I’m 34DDetective Kader.

  Jo had glanced around at the rest of the floor, but no one had been looking at her. The other detectives were leaving or working, or in the middle of a conversation – or just pretending not to know what was going on. She’d screwed up the xerox and tossed it into the trash, boiling with anger but trying not to let it show, and then – as she’d grabbed her car keys from her top drawer – her attention had switched: one of the operators had left a couple of message slips inside.

  The first had been from Caraca BuildIt.

  She’d been waiting on a callback from the assistant manager about whether any containers of acid were missing from their stock. The number listed was for the guy’s home line, so she’d punched in the numbers and – once he’d picked up – had reintroduced herself.

  ‘Ah, right,’ he’d said, ‘sure. I called you earlier.’

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘No.’ It sounded like he was in the middle of eating. ‘I did what you asked and did an audit on the stock. It took a while – but everything’s there.’

  ‘There are no missing containers?’

  ‘Not a single one.’

  She’d put the phone down, drained, frustrated, and then turned to the second message. It was from one of the guys down in Records. Before she’d left East LA, she’d called him and asked him to see if he could find a Jessie or Jessica who’d dropped out of William Hay High School in Belvedere in 1982, and if that Jessie or Jessica had a record. Jo wanted to ID the caller because she needed to know if she could trust her.

  The message she’d been left showed that she couldn’t.

  The caller was Jessica Cespedes, aged twenty. She was living at an address east of the river, in Downey. The guy in Records listed, in familiar department shorthand, some of the crimes on Cespedes’ sheet: forgery, fraud, possession of narcotics. She’d done eight months for intent to distribute in Chino, at the California Institution for Women.

  Jo’s caller was a criminal.

  ‘I’ve got to go and work,’ Ira said, shaking Jo out of her thoughts and returning her to the kitchen, to the stifling air of the house, the locked doors and windows, the perpetual hum of the fans. She squeezed his hand, telling him that was fine, and watched him disappear through to his den. Ira had got the job he’d pitched for on his trip to New York a couple of weeks back, and he’d been right:
it was worth a lot of money, and it would definitely pay for a nice vacation for the three of them next year. But the deadline was at the end of September. It was going to be tight, and although he played it down, she could tell already that he was stressing. He was waking up with headaches every day. He was panicky and restless. She didn’t say anything, but Jo was worried as well about how they’d make it work when she was having to do such long days, when – just to keep her head above water – she was having to leave before Ethan was awake and was getting home after he was asleep. And it wasn’t because of her caseload: she was overloaded, being dragged in a thousand different directions, but that wasn’t the reason she was pulling fourteen-hour days. Or, at least, not the main one. Instead, it was because she was still having to prove herself, even after seven years in homicide. She was still having to bite her tongue and ignore the jibes. She was still having to try to predict how the department – and the men in it – might come at her. They were able to talk about things like instinct on cases, about knowing something intuitively, whereas she had to deliver the facts, or evidence, or both, if she didn’t want to be dismissed out of hand. She was still having to contend with two different rule sets – one for them, one for her – and it was grinding her down. She didn’t want it grinding Ira down too.

  She didn’t want him to forget what it was like to have a wife.

  She didn’t want her son to grow up without seeing her around.

  44

  By the time I got back to the car, I was soaked through.

  I switched the ignition on, turned the heaters to full blast and then checked that I hadn’t been followed. I’d left the Audi in the corner of a near-empty multistorey so it should have been easy enough to spot a tail – but there wasn’t one. There was only one other car on the floor, at the far end, close to the down ramp, and it had clearly long overstayed its welcome because its windscreen had a yellow parking ticket on it and the left front wheel was clamped.

  As mine began to warm up, I shrugged off my coat and went through the pockets.

  In one of them was Patrick’s Dictaphone.

  I held it in my hand for a second, my pulse thumping in my ears, wondering if I’d just made a terrible mistake. There had been dust all over the boxes in the hidden room because they’d gone so long without being looked at. I’d found no itemized list of objects anywhere, no indication that anything in the room had been individually numbered, but that did little to settle my nerves. After what had happened at the cottage, it was obvious that whoever was behind this was on high alert, and that meant, sooner rather than later, they were going to start searching for potential vulnerabilities, ensuring they hadn’t been compromised. They were going to check the room.

  And when they did, they were going to find the Dictaphone missing.

  That meant I had to work fast.

  I looked again at the sequence written on the reverse of it in black felt pen: G76984Z. It had taken me the entire walk back to the car to realize why I recognized the sequence, and in particular the numbers in the middle.

  It was in Isaac Mills’s handwriting.

  The alarm code for Seiger and Sten had been 459822 and the sequence on the dictaphone was G76984Z, so they shared some of the same digits – 4, 9, 8. Mills’s 4 was distinct: the horizontal tail went up slightly, the vertical line kicked out to the left, and his 8 had a small loop at the top rather than at the bottom. It was definitely him. So had he written on the Dictaphone in anticipation of me finding my way into the room? Even if he did, what did the sequence mean? Was he giving me another access code?

  I didn’t know yet, but as much as taking the Dictaphone was a risk, I tried to tell myself that it was less of a risk than leaving it behind. If I had, someone might see what Mills had done, and although I still wasn’t sure what to make of him, still wasn’t sure if I even trusted him, what he’d done for me felt less and less like a trap and, in getting me the key for the room, more like a massive personal gamble.

  I grabbed a USB-to-stereo jack from the glove compartment and plugged one end into the car’s Aux slot and the other into the Dictaphone. After that, I swung the car out and headed for the down ramp, pushing Play as I did. The muted sound of birdsong started to fill the car’s speakers.

  And then Patrick.

  He began discussing Adrian Vale, his background, the fact that he’d been bright, on a fully paid scholarship and on the same Politics course as Beatrix. After a while, he veered away from Vale to discuss the details of Beatrix’s disappearance, the search for her, and what he’d had passed on to him from a source in the Greater Manchester Police. That was Kevin Quinn. He didn’t name Quinn, but I knew that was where all of this had come from, and not only because Quinn had already confirmed as much, but because everything Patrick talked about was pretty much lifted directly from what I’d already seen in Beatrix’s case file. And then he said, ‘I got through to Robert Zaid last week.’

  Zaid was the guy that Beatrix Steards had been through university with, first as they’d studied History, then during the Politics postgrad. The Met had talked to him about Beatrix, about Adrian Vale, and as I recalled that, I recalled something else – what Zaid had said to DS Smoulter during an informal interview: Beatrix, me and a couple of others were walking back from the pub and one of the guys said, ‘Isn’t that Adrian?’ And we all looked around, and it was definitely him, but when he saw us, he darted off into this side street and didn’t appear again.

  Smoulter had always liked Vale for Beatrix’s disappearance but had never had enough evidence to pin it on him, and then two years later, on 12 October 1989, Vale’s body was discovered on a beach in Sussex after he committed suicide. So was it possible that Beatrix’s killer was Vale after all, not the woman talking to Patrick on this tape? Could he have jumped to his death because he felt so guilty about what he’d done? I listened to the buzz on the Dictaphone, to the faint hum of background noise filling the space between conversation. It was possible. But it was just as possible that this woman’s confession was real, and that Adrian Vale had ended up on that beach because he was depressed and grieving. His mother, who he was close to, died the January before he did, something he’d mentioned in a half-finished suicide note left on the beach. He was lonely and reclusive, which was backed up by the fact that not one person – not even the men he shared a house with – realized he was missing.

  ‘So what did Zaid say?’ the woman asked.

  As I listened to her voice, I thought, Who are you?

  Were you really the one that killed Beatrix Steards?

  If you did, why didn’t Patrick go to the cops?

  ‘Pretty much the same story we already know,’ Patrick replied. ‘Zaid said Vale could be weird around Beatrix. Not aggressive as such, more …’ It sounded like he was grimacing, sucking in breath through his teeth. ‘I don’t know, he just used the word “weird”. Like, Vale would try to talk to Beatrix when she was in the middle of talking to someone else; or he’d follow her around. But, then, I also managed to track down a couple of the other people who did that Politics postgrad and they told me Vale was a bit of a loner but was relatively harmless.’

  ‘Do you think Vale was in love with Beatrix?’

  ‘He could have been, yeah.’

  ‘But the police saw it more as an obsession?’

  ‘Well, Smoulter definitely did.’

  ‘Okay,’ the woman said. ‘What else did you find out?’

  ‘Well, as I mentioned, I got in touch with this Robert Zaid guy last week, and, after finally getting his PA to actually do her job properly, the two of us ended up talking over Skype a couple of days later. He’s still down in London; lives in Highgate. He works in the Foreign Office as some kind of diplomat, which he’s been doing for years, although I’ve no idea why: his dad was Iranian and made tons of money from oil back in the seventies, so Zaid was already “don’t have to work” rich. After his parents died, he used his inheritance to invest in a load of Internet start-ups, and now he�
�s not just rich, he’s Sunday Times Rich List rich – which is why I guess it was hard to pin him down.’

  I thought of the money I’d found in the room at Seiger and Sten, and tried to force a connection between Jacob Pierce and Robert Zaid – an easy explanation for how hundreds of thousands of pounds had come into Pierce’s possession. But Zaid had been an irrelevance up until now, a minor side story, and it was Adrian Vale, not Zaid, who had an established connection with Jacob Pierce, using him as his solicitor when he’d been pulled in for questioning after Beatrix vanished. Being wealthy and then knowing Beatrix Steards weren’t the same things as buying Jacob Pierce’s silence and then abducting and killing someone, and on a postgrad, at a good university like King’s College, and in one of the world’s most expensive cities, Zaid wasn’t likely to be the only student who came from money. In fact, it was just as probable now that the postgrad was a redundant line of enquiry – not least because the woman on the tape had already admitted to killing Beatrix.

  I passed a small airfield, the runway lit up by orange lights, and then the dark swallowed everything again and all I could see were cat’s eyes, winking in the middle of the road, and a sign saying that it was three miles to the village the cottage was in.

  The woman’s voice brought me back.

  ‘And this Zaid guy still thinks that it was Adrian Vale who killed Beatrix?’

  ‘He says he’s always believed that’s the most likely explanation.’

  ‘Does he ever talk to anyone else from back then?’

  ‘No. He says he kept in touch with a few of the other Politics students for a while after they graduated, but then they all started to drift apart, and now he doesn’t talk to any of them. Because of Zaid’s money, his net worth, the amount of cash he’s got plugged into these big companies – and, I suppose, the potential for him to be blackmailed and got at – he admitted he tries to keep a low profile. He never does interviews or profile pieces.’

  Again, there was nothing suspicious about a very rich man choosing to limit his exposure to publicity, but the mention of blackmail made me wonder if this might actually be a lead worth chasing up. Pierce had got that money from somewhere, and there was no reason why it couldn’t have been from a man like Robert Zaid – a businessman, a diplomat, a government official, whose reputation and professional interests could be damaged severely over a mistake he might have made in the past: drugs, an affair, the wrong money to the wrong sort of people.