by Tim Weaver
‘So Vale wasn’t playing peacemaker?’
‘Vale was smart. Like, Hadron Collider smart. He scanned that scene like the Terminator: if it got too loud, the people in the adjacent rooms would remember; if a gun went off, the cops would turn up; and if the cops turned up, they’d find all the drugs, then Vale would get charged and there’d be no Stanford for him. There’d be no travelling abroad, like he always dreamed of. At that time, in California, they had some of the harshest drug laws going, so the only place Vale was heading if he got found inside that motel room – or if anyone saw or heard him there – was prison. I mean, why do you think he “borrowed” that car from the old man in the first place? It was all one big insurance policy, a way to insulate himself and protect his identity. But he had another problem: while Vale enjoyed his company, Pablo had a quick temper and a big mouth, so even if they walked out of there with everything sorted, and no one saw or heard a thing, there was no guarantee that Pablo wouldn’t be parading around in the days after, telling the story.’
‘So Vale just killed him?’
‘No. He said he tried to talk him back, told him to calm down, tried to get the gun off him, but Pablo was too pumped up by then. They wrestle for control of the weapon, Vale uses his power and weight to overwhelm Pablo, and then he gets carried away: he knocks Pablo out with the butt of the gun.’
Mills paused, looking down at himself.
The blood glistened around the blade.
‘Now he really has a problem,’ he said. ‘Klein’s panicky and scared, Pablo’s out cold and is going to totally lose his head as soon as he wakes up. The scene that Vale was hoping to de-escalate, he’s made a hundred times worse. So he finds some old rope and ties Klein to a radiator, gags him, and then drags the Mexican kid into the bathroom, ready to tie him up in there. He needs some thinking time. But then Pablo starts coming round on the bathroom floor. As soon as he does, he’s spitting, so full of rage Vale knows there’s no way he’ll ever keep quiet about what happened. And not only that, but Pablo’s got pals back in their neighbourhood who would look dimly on the idea of Vale having knocked him unconscious.’
I flipped to a new page and Mills waited for me to catch up.
‘Vale knocks Pablo out again, grabs a pillow from the bed, puts it over the Mexican kid’s face and pulls the trigger.’
As he stared at me, a breeze moved through the trees.
‘Just like that?’
Mills shrugged. ‘Vale hadn’t killed anyone else before then, but that didn’t mean being capable wasn’t already in his blood. He was off. A part of him was just broken. He was the best liar I ever met in my life – he could lie to you about anything and make you believe it – and anyone who can lie like that, and be that good at it, isn’t right in the head. He never made friends easily because he never found anyone who could hold his attention – there was never anyone that could compete with him intellectually – and all the shit he probably told you while he was pretending to be Zaid – that he told Patrick Perry in 2015 – all that shit about how everyone on that Politics course just turned on Vale after Beatrix Steards went missing, it was him playing games. His whole life, from the moment he became Robert Zaid, has been a lie, so those games – the lies he told – I think he enjoyed them. He never wanted to expose himself, but it was a thrill for him to carry this secret: how much he could get away with, how much he could gild the truth without anyone noticing.’ Mills closed his eyes for a second, the pain obvious in his face, in the rigidity of his body. ‘So, yeah,’ he said, opening his eyes again, ‘he shot Pablo through the face just like that.’
He looked out into the trees, recalling the rest.
‘Trying to dissolve a body in acid: pre-DNA, that was his first smart move – and it wasn’t like getting hold of the acid was hard for him, because he had a key to the builder’s yard where they sold hundreds of gallons of the stuff. He said he went there and picked up what he needed, made an insanely good job of fudging the stocklists so it looked like nothing was missing, and then removed the labels so no one would know where the containers had been bought from once they were found later on. All of this from a first-timer.’
‘And Klein?’
‘Vale said the original plan was to put Klein in the acid bath too, one of them on top of the other. But then – after he left Klein tied up in the motel room, and after he’d picked up all that acid – he deviated from the plan. He used Klein’s driving licence to locate his house instead. Vale decided he needed to discover whatever he could about Klein – which, again, is pretty smart for an amateur. It’s pretty lucid and cold-blooded. That’s what I mean about Vale. He wasn’t right.’
‘So he goes to Klein’s – then what?’
‘When he gets to the house, in the front room, there’s Klein’s mum. She’s badly disabled, wires coming out of her everywhere. So he gets inside the home and just wanders around while she’s sleeping, and he sees the sort of relationship that Klein has with his mother, how close they are – all these photos of the two of them – and that was when the plan changed direction. That was when he knew he could get Klein to take the fall for Pablo’s murder. I mean, Klein was just a kid selling drugs to pay for his mum’s medical bills. He wasn’t some criminal mastermind.’
Mills coughed, the movement hurting him.
‘He manipulated Klein by threatening the mother,’ he went on, hoarser now, ‘maybe because he recognized himself in Klein and knew how to push the right buttons. Vale loved his mother too. He was fucked in the brain but that much was human about him. And the mum, she was how he got Klein up to some park in LA on that same night; she was how he put Klein on his knees up there. Vale pulled the trigger for him but the mother was the reason Klein put the gun in his mouth. He said to Klein that he’d kill her. Vale said he’d make the old bitch suffer.’
A terrible, prolonged silence settled between us.
Eventually, Mills said, ‘He was a killer before he ever killed, and he stayed that way after. You could see it if you looked for it. So, you know, the other students on that Politics course, I’m sure they did whisper behind his back when Beatrix Steards went missing, maybe even passed a comment in front of him, but they didn’t stand up to him. No one bullied or pushed Adrian Vale around like he said. Most of them were probably as shit-scared as Donald Klein was that night at the motel.’
He let out a grinding breath.
‘You need a doctor, Isaac.’
‘Yeah? And what am I going to tell them?’
He looked down at the knife again, the blade, the grip.
‘Just write down what I’m saying,’ he said sharply.
He raised the gun off his lap, reminding me it was there.
‘I always knew what kind of a person he was,’ he said, his voice trapped inside the trees, its bleakness and remorse somehow at home here, ‘so it wasn’t naivety. The very first time Jacob Pierce brought me on board, the first time I took money from Vale, I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. But the money was so good. I thought, “I’ll just do this for a while, and then get out.”’ He shook his head.
‘How much does Jacob Pierce know?’
‘Enough to take his share and keep quiet.’
I thought of Seiger and Sten, of the boxes full of cash.
‘You know what’s funny?’ Mills said, smiling, his eyes returning to me. ‘There isn’t a Seiger and Sten. There’s no Mr Seiger and Mr Sten, and there never was. That’s just the name that Jacob gave his practice because he said it would make it feel like it had been going for years. It’s why he’s got that place in the Shambles, so it looks all olde worlde and established.’ He looked down at the gun, at the hands holding it, pale and bloodied. ‘It’s a measure of who he is, I suppose, a measure of who Vale was as well: they even lie about the simple things.’
‘And you?’ I asked.
He looked across at me.
‘You haven’t lied about the simple things?’
I expected a reaction of som
e kind, a flash of anger, but instead he just rolled his shoulders in acceptance, an admission of guilt.
‘I lied,’ he said quietly. ‘But mostly I just tried to forget.’
I watched him, pen poised above the page.
‘I tried to forget what Vale told me about those two kids in LA, I tried to forget what he told me about Beatrix Steards – and, for two and a half years, I’ve been trying to forget what we did to the people from Black Gale …’
65
At the mention of Black Gale, the forest seemed to still.
‘I was there that night,’ Mills said. ‘And then I was here when we took them all out to the forest. I know everything.’
He swallowed, looked up at me.
‘But Beatrix Steards, that’s more of a mystery. He never really told me much about her. What I know, I’ve pieced together over the time I’ve worked for him, and from what Jacob Pierce has let slip over the years.’
‘Vale told Pierce the truth about Beatrix?’
‘Enough of it.’
‘And the truth is what?’
‘She spurned him,’ he replied mechanically. ‘Isn’t that where most of this shit begins? Half the cases I worked in my time as a cop were because a woman said no.’
‘So Vale asked her out?’
‘He liked her, he wanted to date her, but she found him weird – definitely too weird to date – and then he got his signals all mixed up and made his move on the night she vanished, when the two of them were alone at that party. When he came on all hot and heavy, she was taken aback, wasn’t polite or subtle about it – probably saw what I saw, a stone-cold psychopath – and she told him no. But not no; more like no way, not ever.’ His silence filled in the gaps. ‘Anyway, he’s so besotted with her that instead of just taking it like a man, he gets angry.’
He sighed, the sound like fat crackling in a pan.
‘He’d learned something from what happened back in LA: taking his former boss’s car made it hard to put him at the scene, so he did the same the night he took Beatrix. This time, he borrowed a car belonging to one of his housemates – did it without the housemate ever knowing. And, of course, that was clever because why would the cops look at a car that didn’t belong to him, and there was no evidence of ever having been taken, when they were searching for Beatrix?’
‘How did he get her into the car?’
‘He never told me, and Pierce doesn’t know, but I know where she’s buried. He drove her into the Chiltern Hills …’ The timbre of his voice was low and robotic now: he was hurting, but he was trying to remember, trying to get it all out, perhaps atone in some way. ‘It’s an hour out of London, but it’s like a different world. I drove up there once to see if I could find her, but I had no idea where to even start. There were these woods he’d found: the head of a pin compared to this place, but big enough.’ Mills looked down at himself again, his hands, his fingers on the gun, the hard ground beneath his body. ‘He told Pierce he hid her inside the hollow of this old tree – shoved her in there like she was some piece of old junk. She was still dressed. He hadn’t …’ He ground to a halt. ‘She wasn’t naked. He hadn’t done anything like that. But he said she had two bullet wounds in her: one above the knee – that would have been to slow her down when she was running away; and one through the back of the head – that would have been when he’d had enough of her.’
When he’d had enough of her.
We both lingered on the dreadful nature of that statement.
‘Jacob Pierce knows enough,’ Mills said. ‘Make sure that prick burns.’
The wind came again, harder this time, the trees creaking softly, their branches moving like the arms of a conductor. I asked if I could stand: I was cold, in pain, and my hands were freezing. Mills watched me for a moment, eyes narrowing, as if this were a trick I was trying to play on him. But then he nodded, and I hauled myself up, and so did he. It was slow and painful for him, but he kept the gun on me.
‘Why are you making me write this, Isaac?’
‘You’ll see,’ he said.
His response sent a prickle of fear along my spine.
‘You know how Vale found out what Patrick and Freda were doing, right?’
I nodded. ‘Patrick called Robert Zaid to ask him about Vale.’
Except Zaid and Vale were the same person.
And that was when everything changed.
It was the catalyst for what happened at Black Gale. It was why the listening devices were installed in the houses. It was why Vale started watching Patrick and Freda from the shadows – and, on Halloween night, it was why he’d taken them both.
Except he hadn’t just taken those two.
‘Why did you take all nine villagers?’ I asked Mills.
‘Because they all knew.’
‘All knew what?’ I said.
‘They all knew about Beatrix Steards.’
I frowned. ‘Patrick and Freda told them?’
He was staring down at the ground, digging at the crazed earth with the toe of his boot. ‘Patrick and Freda had one conversation about Beatrix in their houses. It was the morning of the dinner party. It was the only time we ever actually heard them talk about her, even though we’d had the houses bugged for a week by that time, ever since Patrick went to see “Robert Zaid”. It turned out they always met away from Black Gale, where none of the other neighbours would see them or suspect anything.’
‘So what changed?’
He sighed. ‘Patrick started to see the links.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘After his interview with Robert Zaid, something started to rub at him.’
‘He figured out Robert Zaid was Adrian Vale.’
Mills shrugged. ‘I don’t know if he figured it out, but he told Freda something was up with Zaid. Francesca Perry was at work, John Davey was out at the shops somewhere, and so Patrick and Freda spoke on her doorstep. She was starting to go downhill by then, and while Patrick was working as hard as he could trying to find answers for her, he wasn’t working fast enough, and he knew it. And then there was this voice in his head niggling at him about Zaid. So he comes up with an idea.’
‘He says to Freda they need to tell everyone at the dinner party,’ I said.
‘Exactly.’
‘Because he thinks they can help?’
‘Laura Gibbs seemed bright, she was tenacious, she spent a lot of time online; when he wasn’t farming, her son spent even more, always on forums and all that shit, websites like Reddit where you could crowdsource an entire missing persons search using a bunch of Internet sleuths with too much time on their hands. Francesca had patient records at her fingertips and – who knows? – maybe Patrick could try and persuade her to call in a favour if they ever needed access to someone’s history in another hospital. John Davey was a historian, and good research skills were what they were after; even Emiline, the part-time librarian, was smart – bookish, academic. Plus, Chris Gibbs’s sister was some kind of writer for FeedMe, so she knew how to unearth a story as well. It was an intelligent move. Believe me, there were brains at that dinner table. But then, by looping everyone in, Freda had to tell them why she was doing it – and that meant telling them the truth.’
‘That she was looking for a daughter they didn’t know about.’
A breath of wind in the trees.
‘And that her cancer was terminal.’ Mills nodded. ‘That was the only thing holding her back.’
‘Because she hadn’t even told her husband or her kids.’
‘Right. They just thought she was delaying her treatment.’
Around us, the trees moved again and, for the first time, I could see the sun, winking through the canopy at a low angle off to my left. I’d wondered earlier if it was dawn or dusk, but now I could see the answer: the sky was lightening and the light improving.
‘But, in the end, she went ahead with it?’
Mills nodded again. He was propped up against the tree now, weakening every second w
e spent out here – not bleeding profusely, but bleeding enough for it to make a difference. He blinked, as if struggling to focus, and said, ‘Vale was paying some kid to sit and listen to these people, all day, every day, and not to ask questions why, and when I called in to check on him about a week in, the kid mentioned a dinner party. So he reads back what he’s heard. At this point, it was already 5 p.m. …’
He stopped, guilt embedded like shrapnel in his face.
‘I called Vale.’ He closed his eyes, winced. ‘I picked up the phone and I called him to let him know, thinking he’d just want to sit on it and hear the recording from the dinner party first, get a sense of what they all discussed. We’d only been listening in for a week or so by then. It was no time at all, really. But he didn’t. As soon as I told him Patrick was getting suspicious about who Zaid was, he went totally fucking nuts. The idea of even more people looking into Beatrix, and then looking into Adrian Vale, and then asking questions about Robert Zaid, it just blinded him. He told me we were going to go to the village straight away. I said, “This is a bad idea. We’re not prepared for this. You’d be better off biding your time,” and he said he didn’t give a single shit what I thought, and that he already had a plan in place. It was too late to stop the dinner party from happening, too late to stop Patrick and Freda discussing it there, but it wasn’t too late for Vale to stem the bleeding.’
At the mention of blood, he looked down at himself again, and then off at the trees behind me again, deeper into the forest. It took him a moment to rediscover the thread of the conversation, his eyes distant, his expression fixed and difficult to fathom.
‘He had to come up from London, so they’d had a lot to drink by the time we got there. A lot. Randolph, he didn’t drink as much as the rest of them because he had some sort of a liver thing, but Patrick, John, Francesca, Emiline, the Gibbses – they’d all piled it in. Freda had had plenty to drink too: not as much the others, but enough. She’d told John before they even left for the party, which was probably a lot of the reason. She’d said she owed him the truth before anyone else heard it. I sat there and listened to her telling him about Beatrix, about the fact that she was dying, before Vale and I left for the village, and, honestly, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. It was fucking horrible. And just as they’d got themselves together and cleaned themselves up, put a brave face on everything, she went down the track and did it again for seven other people. I remember it so clearly. They were all totally shocked by what she told them – tears, denials, the sort of reaction you’d expect from friends – and then she started talking about Beatrix Steards and it galvanized them.’
