No One Home

by Tim Weaver

  In it, Zaid was tall and thin, a good-looking kid but a scrawny one. His father was the same: even in adulthood, he’d remained slender, his height – six two, six three – appearing to narrow him even further. And he was incredibly dark, his hair and moustache jet black, his eyes like blobs of ink, his skin almost sepia, as if some artificial filter had been added. Except it hadn’t: Zaid’s mother was beside his father, holding her husband’s hand, as physically different from the man she’d married as it was possible to be. She would have been in her forties at the time the picture was taken, but her age seemed immaterial: she was absolutely beautiful, timeless, her skin pale – almost pearlescent – her eyes a deep, ocean blue. In front of them, Robert was smiling, his father’s hand on his shoulder, and it was easy to note both his parents in him: his father’s stature, his mother’s eyes, skin colour that was a near-perfect mix of the two.

  So what could I see?

  What didn’t feel right?

  My eyes switched to three shots on its left.

  None of the photos was ordered chronologically, so in these ones Zaid ranged from early fifties to early thirties, then back into his forties, and in two of them he was overweight, the shirt and jacket he was wearing straining at the stitching.

  In the first, he was outside the front of a home he owned in the south of France: I couldn’t see much of the house itself, but I could see its name written on one of the gateposts in Arabic – a nod to his father’s Iranian roots – and knew that what I could see of the building tallied with the description of one of the four houses he owned.

  In the second, he was on the tarmac at some kind of airfield, smiling for the camera, his arms opened wide, presumably in celebration of the fact that he’d just bought himself a plane. In his left hand was a large, inflatable ignition key with a key fob reading ‘The Zaid Express’. I didn’t know much about jets, but I knew enough: even second-hand, even conservatively, he’d have probably dropped £20 million on it.

  In the third, he was on a ski slope somewhere, among a group of what must have been friends. He had his arms around two of them and he looked fit and tanned.

  My gaze lingered on the pictures.

  Again, something stirred in me.

  I took in what I could see of his house in France, its Arabic name, and then switched to the airfield – it was definitely somewhere in the UK: in the distance I could see a long row of 1930s terraced houses – and then to the shot of him on the slopes. He was fitter on that trip, sculpted, but in the other two his face was bloated and red.

  I looked at other photos, taken in his twenties when he was assigned to the British Consulate in Hong Kong and to the embassy in Jakarta. There was a shot of him, overweight again, in Dubai in the mid 2000s, presumably when he’d been working further along the Arabian peninsula in Oman. More photographs of him, this time in Russia, in Kenya, in South Africa, all of which tied into the locations of jobs he’d said he’d had while working for the Foreign Office. As I looked at a portrait of him on Cape Town waterfront, I thought again about his reasons for still working at the FCO, despite having enough money not to work for twenty other lifetimes: You should always listen to your parents – especially ones as remarkable as mine.

  I stepped back from the wall.

  Out of forty-five pictures, there was only one of his parents: it was the frame in the centre, the one of the three of them, with Zaid as a boy, at their place in Marbella. So if his mum and dad had been so remarkable, where were they? Zaid had just one portrait of them, and yet I could see lots of photos of the same, less important faces – friends, colleagues, business partners, someone who had probably been a nanny. Other than the one of him with his parents in Marbella, there were four shots of Zaid as a boy: at the age of one or two, at his fifth birthday party, at about ten, and in his early teens.

  I stepped in closer again, trying to get a better look at one of the shots nearest to me, but the moment I did, I saw something else at the very margins of my eyeline.

  It was right in the corner of the room, wrapped in shadow and fixed as high up the wall as it could conceivably go, ensuring that – without a ladder – it was impossible to get at. I moved away from the photos, glancing along the hallway at Zaid’s closed door, and stopped beneath the object on the wall.

  It was about the size of a credit card, and looked like a cross between a wireless router and an electric key fob. There were three small antennae on top of it.

  My stomach dropped.

  I looked at my phone, still in my hand – still with no bars showing, no hint of a reception – and then back up to the object on the wall.

  Zaid had installed a signal jammer.

  56

  I spun on my heel, panicked, looking at Zaid’s closed bedroom door, my heart pounding in my chest.

  Moving towards the hallway, I kept my eyes on the door, then stopped again, listening. Over the sound of my heart, all I could hear was the hum of the central heating and the wind pressing at the windows.

  I started inching forward again, approaching the doorways on the left and right. In one was a bathroom with a Jacuzzi, a wet room and two marble basins. In the other was an office, modern and immaculately decorated like everywhere else. There was a computer, shelves of books, files. On the desk beside the computer was an in-tray. My eyes were drawn to what looked like a printout on top, something typed across it in bold.

  G76984Z.

  I quickly moved into the room and picked up the printout. It was an email that Zaid had received from someone called Carson Connolly. G76984Z was the subject line, and Connolly worked for a company called Parsonfield. I vaguely recognized the name of the company, but couldn’t remember where from.

  The email itself seemed short and trivial.

  From: carson_connolly@parsonfield.co.uk

  To: rz@robertzaidholdings.com

  Subject: Ref – G76984Z

  Hi Mr Zaid –– just to let you know that I’ve managed to move your slot forward, as requested, to 10 a.m. tomorrow. I’m not in, but it should all be absolutely fine. Just in case, though, why don’t you bring a copy of this email with you?

  It was sent four hours ago.

  I grabbed my phone, took a picture of the printout, then put it back where I’d found it. As I did, I noticed something on the next shelf down.

  A photocopy of a driving licence.

  I reached in and took it out, then realized it wasn’t a photocopy but a fax. There was a machine behind me, on a desk in the corner, but it wasn’t connected to the Internet, running instead off an old-fashioned phone line. Using technology this old only had one real benefit: it couldn’t be intercepted digitally. It couldn’t be hacked. If Zaid put the faxed document through the shredder tomorrow, there would be no record of it left.

  I looked at the black-and-white licence.

  The face of a woman in her sixties looked back at me: shoulder-length hair cut into a bob, an elegant mix of black streaks and natural greys; green eyes, glasses. In the bottom right, it listed her height as five nine and her weight as 140 pounds. In the top right was a bear icon.

  The driving licence was Californian.

  Her name had been circled in black pen, and an arrow went from that to a note at the side of the sheet. It was in Isaac Mills’s handwriting:

  Source at North Yorkshire police says she’s been in touch. She’s ex-LAPD. Been asking questions about Patrick Perry.

  I froze.

  Patrick Perry had talked to Freda about having one more call lined up. He’d said he was going to use a payphone and a pre-loaded calling card, ensuring there was no record of the conversation at home. So was this who he’d called? An ex-cop in Los Angeles? Most pre-loaded cards were for making international calls, so it wasn’t a stretch, and the woman was from the same city as Adrian Vale. So had she known Vale? Had their paths crossed? And did she know that Patrick was now missing?

  I took another look at the woman’s face, her name, took a photograph of the licence, then put th
e photocopy back and moved out into the hallway. I stepped to my right, trying to get a better angle on the staircase in front of me, but wasn’t able to see much more than a couple of paintings, so I kept my eyes fixed on Zaid’s door as I approached the next rooms along.

  They were both spare bedrooms, stylish and clean but with the unlived-in feel of empty wardrobes and permanently made beds. I’d stopped short of the stairs but could see all the way up them now: at the top was a closed door, and visible through the balustrade was another. There had to be more rooms up there, but my attention had switched again.

  Why was it so quiet in here?

  I moved to his bedroom door, could see it had been left marginally ajar, and pushed at it. It swung back, revealing some of the furniture I’d glimpsed earlier: a huge bed, a pair of wardrobes, and a bay window looking out at nothing but darkness. There was a walk-in wardrobe on the other side, its door also ajar, and an en suite where I could see a shower and half a basin.

  ‘Robert?’

  In the bathroom, I heard someone move.

  I realized I was holding my breath, my head swimming, nerves firing in every part of me, and as I came around the bed I found a cordless phone discarded on the carpet, abandoned between the end of the frame and the start of the bathroom’s wooden floors. It was the one Zaid had been using earlier.

  All I could hear now was the drone of a dial tone.

  I took another step forward, and then another, and – in the bathroom – a man came into view: he was standing on the opposite side, leaning against one of the walls, waiting for me.

  He had a gun aimed at my chest.

  ‘Mills?’

  An expression filled Isaac Mills’s face. I wasn’t sure what it was to start with. Anger? Sorrow? Pain? And then I realized – too late – that it wasn’t any of them.

  It was guilt.

  It was a warning.

  Someone’s behind me.

  The second I started to turn, it felt like the side of my head imploded. The butt of a knife handle cracked me in the temple – I could see the flash of a blade, facing up, out of a palm; an arm; a shoulder – and then I lurched sideways, landing awkwardly. When I tried to look up, to get on to my back, I felt the same arm jam against my throat, the crook of an elbow clamping against my windpipe.

  I was in a chokehold.

  I tried to move, to thrash around – tried to punch and kick my way free – but there was nothing to grab on to – and, even if there had been, the chokehold was too tight, the arm like an iron bar I couldn’t shift.

  My vision began to smear.

  I glanced desperately left and right as everything turned grey, was conscious long enough to hear Mills say something to whoever had hold of me, and then finally everything shut down.

  I slumped sideways and hit the floor.

  Black.

  Retirement: Part 2

  2015

  Los Angeles | Sunday 1 November

  Her cellphone woke her, buzzing furiously across the nightstand. Turning over – aching from sleeping in the same position for hours – Jo glanced at the clock.

  7 a.m.

  Who the hell would be calling her so early on a Sunday morning?

  She scooped up her phone, wondering if it might be Ethan, and then grabbed her glasses, sliding them on.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Ms Kader?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She rubbed at an eye.

  ‘It’s Patrick. We talked the other day.’

  She frowned.

  Patrick. The British guy who’d called about Adrian Vale.

  ‘Ms Kader?’

  ‘Uh, yeah. I don’t think we agreed seven in the morning, did we?’

  ‘No, I’m so sorry for calling you so early. Something’s come up here that I have to take care of, but I still wanted to make sure that I got back in touch in order to follow up on what we talked about. You know, Adrian Vale and Beatrix Steards, and all of that.’

  Jo sat up in bed and then hauled herself to her feet.

  ‘Ms Kader?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m here, I’m here.’

  She wandered through to the living room, wiping the sleep from her eyes, and looked around for the legal pad she’d used during their phone call the day before. It turned out she hadn’t written much down, mostly because she’d had a crashing hangover and about two seconds after she’d ended the call with this guy, she was puking into the toilet bowl. But at the top she’d written his name: Patrick.

  ‘Do you remember what we talked about?’ he asked.

  She glanced at her notes again. She’d written down the name Beatrix Steards, but aside from that there wasn’t much to jog her memory.

  ‘I think we’re going to have to start from the beginning, Mr, uh …?’

  ‘Oh, okay.’ He didn’t offer his surname. ‘How come?’

  ‘I wasn’t feeling so good yesterday.’

  ‘I see.’ A pause. ‘That’s why I said I’d call back.’

  This time, it was Jo’s turn to pause.

  ‘Do you remember anything at all?’ the guy asked her.

  It was a weird question: he hadn’t framed it as an insult, more like some kind of a test. She frowned, fully awake now, her brain kicking into gear.

  Was he the same as this yesterday?

  ‘Ms Kader?’

  ‘You mentioned Adrian Vale possibly having a connection to a disappearance over there in the UK.’ She glanced at her notes. ‘Beatrix Steards.’

  ‘Ah, of course,’ came the reply.

  There was something else now too: she wasn’t any expert on British accents, but she knew enough, and the guy yesterday had been from the north. Even with a hangover, she remembered thinking how much he’d sounded like a character from Game of Thrones.

  But this guy didn’t have the same accent.

  ‘What did you say your surname was, Patrick?’

  No response this time.

  ‘Patrick?’

  The line went dead.

  Jo looked at her phone. Had he been cut off? Or had he hung up on her deliberately? She looked at her legal pad, at the name Patrick, and then waited a couple of minutes to see if he was going to call again. When he didn’t, she switched to her landline, dialled the number logged in her cellphone and waited for it to connect.

  But it didn’t even ring.

  The number he’d called from was completely dead.

  57

  When I came around again, it felt like no time had passed at all and yet I was tied to a chair in the corner of a room I hadn’t been into. My knees were touching the walls and all I could see was wallpaper. No furniture. No doors. No way out.

  I felt drowsy, my head a fog of pain and confusion, but I knew enough: I was upstairs. I could hear the same noises outside – the city, its hum, the occasional car engine and siren – it was just the carpet and wallpaper that had changed.

  I tried moving.

  My hands were tied to the arms of a large oak chair, impossible to shuffle or move on the carpet, and my ankles were bound at the legs. I turned my head, pushing as far as I could to my left, and – at the fullest rotation of my neck – I saw him: he was right at the periphery of my vision, sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the room.

  Zaid.

  ‘I’ll let you in on a little secret, David,’ he said.

  My neck was starting to ache already, but I held it there, watching him. He’d changed: he didn’t have his tracksuit on any more, or his training top, he was dressed in a suit – all black, except for a charcoal shirt. He’d been sitting with his legs crossed, but now he uncrossed them and came forward in the chair, his elbows on his knees.

  ‘I still don’t know if I trust Isaac.’

  I was forced to face the corner of the room again, my neck stiff, the unnatural position I had to reach to even look at Zaid sending sparks of pain into my skull.

  ‘I mean, I suppose he’s off getting things ready for me now,’ he said, his voice maintaining exactly the sa
me speed, rhythm and pitch, as if he were reading off an autocue. ‘He’s doing what I asked. But he’s not my man. He’s Jacob Pierce’s. Jacob vouched for him, Jacob was the one who said they’d worked together once on a case up north, and Jacob was the one who said Isaac was susceptible, that he could be turned. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? In my experience, most people can have their head turned with money. That’s why rich people generally do whatever the fuck they want. You wave enough pound notes in front of someone’s face and it’s amazing what they’ll forget. Their memories, their morals, it all goes out of the window. But then, after a while, you start to earn so much, so often, that, in a weird way, the money helps you see more clearly. Instead of making you lose your morals, it brings them back into focus.’

  I looked again in his direction, but he’d deliberately placed his chair directly behind me so that, whichever way I turned, I could only see the very edges of him.

  ‘Discussing money, its power to corrupt, always reminds me of another story. It’s about Adrian Vale. What I said downstairs about him, most of it was true. He was a loner, he was weird, people didn’t really get him. But the idea that I gave him the name of a solicitor when Beatrix went missing, well, that isn’t quite true. That was an embellishment. Because, actually, I was the one who called Jacob Pierce.’

  I frowned. ‘What?’

  It was the first time I’d spoken.

  I sounded groggy, hoarse.

  ‘Did you have a good look through my things, David?’

  I turned, trying to see him behind me.

  ‘Is that what took you so long to get to the bathroom? Were you nosing around in my office, looking at my things?’ He made a soft tut, tut, tut sound. ‘Joline Kader,’ he said, forcing a breath out with her name. I thought of the driving licence with her picture on it. ‘Is that who you were looking at?’

  She’d been asking questions about Patrick.

  ‘That bitch was like a dog with a bone.’

  Again, he paused.

  But this time it was because he was moving.