by Tim Weaver
‘The mood changed?’
‘Instantly changed. She didn’t have to persuade any of them because they were all on board from minute one. Patrick sat there and talked to them about what he’d already done, what the new plan of attack was, who was going to do what, and once they were all clear on their roles, they cracked open the wine and the beer and got drunk.’
‘So what time did you and Vale turn up?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking out beyond me again. His eyes kept going to the same spot. ‘Nine, maybe. Nine thirty. They’d just made coffee.’
‘And then what happened?’
We looked at each other – me wanting to know, him not wanting to relive it – as frost drifted through the air, blown from the branches by the stirring of the wind.
‘I’d been to the village before that, posing as an engineer from BT, spouting some bullshit about needing to upgrade their phone line.’ He paused and I could see it fitted into what I knew already of how the bugs were installed. ‘We did the Perrys’ and Daveys’ first, and then a few days later, Vale decides he wants all of them bugged, so he comes with me and we do the Gibbses’ and then Solomon and Wilson’s place as well. I’m in there, sneaking around the houses, trying to install these bloody listening devices while everyone’s still at home, and he’s off doing I don’t know what the hell else, keeping out of sight. I figured he was just looking around the homes when he could, getting a feel for who these people were. And, in part, that was true.’
I frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Halloween night, we hire a van and drive it up there, and then park it outside the boundaries of the village, so there are no visible tyre tracks. He’s brought these brand-new wellington boots with him, not even in his size, and a pair of new walking shoes, and it takes me a few seconds to catch on. Then he hands me the walking shoes and tells me to put them on, and that’s when I get it.’ Mills glanced at me, seeing if I understood where this was heading, and I did: when Mills was installing the bugs, Vale had already been thinking about the endgame. ‘The walking shoes,’ Mills went on, ‘were an exact match – make, size, everything – for a pair John Davey had. The wellies were exactly the same: Chris Gibbs had a pair, same size, same make, same print on the bottom …’
Now it all made sense.
Footprints and tyre tracks were found that night, but all of them belonged to the villagers. The tracks matched up with tyres on the cars belonging to the Daveys, Perrys, Gibbses and to Randolph Solomon, and the same was true of the shoes. When the police cross-referenced the footwear found inside the houses with the footprints found around the properties, everything matched up.
‘That was why he left the van on the main road,’ I said quietly.
Mills nodded. ‘It was tarmacked, so there would never be any evidence of us out there. Inside the village, though, it was different: the track was mud and loose stone.’
‘So whose car did you use to get them to the van?’
‘Solomon and Wilson’s camper,’ Mills said. ‘It was why we never put it back on the driveway. It was why we took it that night and sent it to the crusher. By the end of the evening, it was full of nine people’s DNA – full of ours too – and not only that: we figured, if the camper van was the only vehicle missing, it would point the finger of suspicion at Solomon and Wilson.’
It was so simple.
‘And no one put up a fight?’
Mills looked down at his gun. ‘We went there in masks, we were armed, we were shouting and screaming at them the whole time, putting weapons to their heads and telling them we’d blow their brains out if they did anything stupid …’ He sniffed, glanced at me. ‘They were just ordinary people. Four of them were pensioners and one of them was barely even an adult. They were terrified. Vale tied them up, gagged them and took them out two at a time to the camper van, then he drove them back up to the main road, dumped them in the van and returned. Four times he did that, and then the fifth time he took Patrick. And do you know what I did? I just stood there in the kitchen throughout all of it, pointing my gun at these people I knew weren’t ever coming home again, and tried not to hear them begging.’
The emotion played out in his eyes.
‘Why didn’t you stop Vale?’ I asked.
‘And then what?’ he fired back, anger flashing in his face now. ‘I’d taken over three hundred grand from him already, sorting out all these little problems for him: when people asked too many questions, or started sniffing around, or he just decided that he didn’t like someone, there I was to shut them down: this anonymous voice at the end of an untraceable line, waving some past indiscretion in front of them that would land them in deep shit. That’s what I was. That’s all I did for him. I dug into lives, found these ruinous things – and I used them to help Vale maintain his lie.’
‘You were scared of him,’ I said.
He looked at me like I was insane: ‘Of course I was fucking scared of him. He was a monster, and I was in debt to him. If I walked away, he’d ruin me or kill me. He told me he kept a hidden record of everything I did, so even if I made a move, there was all this shit on me, just waiting to be found, even after he was six feet under the ground. I’d taken all that cash from him, I’d kept silent, I’d destroyed lives. There was no escape.’ Except, perhaps, through someone else, which was why he’d left the key for me.
Finally, almost dreading the answer, I said, ‘And after that?’
‘I’d left my car in Skipton, so he dropped me there and then I didn’t hear from him again for almost two weeks. He had properties all over the place, including empty units he’d bought with a view to developing them into businesses, so I expect he took them to one of those. He would have drugged them at some point, to keep them quiet and pliant: I don’t know where he got his supplies from, or where he learned to use that crap, but he was good with it. He always knew the right amounts, how much kept you under for how long, the risks. Like I said, he was bright. That was what made him so dangerous. Anyway, a fortnight later, he calls me up and tells me to come to London.’
I frowned. ‘For what reason?’
He swallowed, his throat like a broken piston. ‘He says he’s put them all somewhere no one will ever find them. So I meet him at his house, and I ask him where this place is, where he’s planning on taking them, and he says to me, “They’re already there. Why do you think it’s taken me two weeks to call you?”’ Mills looked off into the forest. ‘He brought them here one by one to lessen the risk. That was why he was so quiet for so long. I don’t think he trusted me not to screw it up, which is why he never involved me until they were actually here and it was too late. The smaller things, maintaining his lie, sorting out his problems, digging into people’s lives, he’d seen enough of my work to know that I could handle that. But transporting nine people to their execution? That takes a different type of person, and he knew that person wasn’t me.’ He swallowed a second time, and a third, as if the taste of that moment was ash in his mouth. ‘And so he brings me here. This place is just another part of Vale that no one knows about.’
I looked around the forest.
‘There are others out here.’
‘What?’ I eyed Mills. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Somewhere in the trees, he’s put others in the ground. People who’ve got too close to knowing the real him, people who’ve endangered the lie he tells. I don’t know how many, or over how long, but I’ve seen their clothes in that box at Seiger and Sten, I’ve seen emails, paperwork, notes, little things that just don’t make sense. I’ve seen people disappear who I know he has dealings with, and I know it was him. I know he must have put them out here because, this place, it’s all his – and it goes on for ever.’
‘Where are we, Isaac?’
‘You ever heard of Parsonfield?’
I had. It was on an email I’d seen in Robert Zaid’s study.
‘Is that what this place is called?’
But he didn’t seem
to have heard me.
‘Isaac?’
He wrapped his hands around the knife handle.
‘Isaac?’
‘Shit,’ he said softly, fresh blood spilling out of his wound.
He moved the blade in his stomach, crying out, and then shifted against the tree again, pushing himself away from the bark. As he did, he staggered slightly, almost losing his footing. Once he’d recovered, he used the gun again, gesturing at the notebook in my hands, and said, ‘You finished there?’
I looked down at my notes and then back to him.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Have I?’
‘Throw me over the notebook.’
I looked at him, uncertain what was going on.
‘Throw over the notebook,’ he shouted.
I did as he asked and he caught it with his spare hand. Once he’d wriggled it back into his coat pocket, he raised the gun and said, ‘We’re going to start walking in that direction.’
He looked at the forest behind me, at the same spot as earlier.
‘What’s in there?’ I asked.
I tried not to sound panicked, but it was hard.
‘Isaac?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Isaac, where are we going?’
‘Shut up,’ he spat. ‘It’s over.’
He looked at me, sorrow carved into his face.
‘This is the end for you now.’
66
The forest closed in around us.
‘Isaac, you don’t have to do this.’
‘Don’t speak, don’t turn around.’
As we walked, Mills trailed behind me, the gun out in front of him, telling me where to head. It all looked the same in front, the ground frozen, the branches reaching out, the canopy preventing much in the way of sunlight from hitting the forest floor. Whenever I looked over my shoulder, Mills would wave me forward with the gun, but his legs were barely carrying him now and the crimson bloom around the knife wound was expanding, crawling away from his stomach towards his hip, down to his groin, up to his chest. He stumbled a couple of times and quickly reset himself, but he couldn’t go on like this. Even if the knife hadn’t hit his organs, he’d still been stabbed. He was losing blood, he was in shock, his skin was greying and his breathing was getting shallower.
I just had to wait for the right moment.
About twenty minutes later, we hit a small clearing, a wooden shack at one edge, next to a stream. The shack was padlocked from the outside, a pitchfork and shovel propped next to the door, and what looked like a plastic groundsheet beside those. The pitchfork and shovel had mud caked on them.
I looked from the shack to Mills, and watched as he stopped at the edge of the clearing, pale against the trunks of the pine trees that flanked him. He followed my eyes, to the plastic, to the tools, and then he pointed beyond the shack, to where the forest continued on the opposite side of the stream, and said, ‘They’re all in there.’ He blinked, as if he were struggling to focus. ‘All nine of them are in there.’
I looked beyond the stream, into the trees.
This is the end for you now.
He’d meant the case, not my life.
‘Vale didn’t give a shit about them once they were dead,’ Mills said, his voice so low now it was barely even a whisper. ‘He would have happily left them where they dropped. No one would have found them. No one comes out this far. But I couldn’t.’
It took him a moment to find his words again and for the first time he dropped the gun to his side, as if he didn’t have the strength or the energy to hold it any more.
‘I couldn’t leave them like that.’
‘You buried them all yourself?’
He nodded: a single, painful jerk of the head.
‘He kept them in the same hole you were in, and then, once I arrived here, we took them out and walked them down to this spot. He’d done all the prep himself – travelled here with them, one by one – but he wanted to kill them all at the same time, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to handle nine people alone, even armed. There was too much risk. So that was what he brought me for. When I had doubts, he told me he would kill me. When I tried to beg him not to do it, he put a gun in my mouth and told me he would pull the trigger. I think a part of him liked the idea of me being here too: it gave him something else to use. I’d be complicit, even if I never fired a bullet. I’d be so deep into the swamp there would be no way out.’
‘So you went along with it.’
He nodded. ‘I stayed silent and listened to him explain to me how killing nine people at the same time was easier. He said he’d already been away from work longer than he should have been.’ Mills smiled, an anguished, distressed twitch of the mouth. ‘Longer than he should have been – like he’d been talking to the neighbours and hadn’t realized the time.’ Tears flashed in his eyes. ‘So, yes, I stood about where you are now and watched him do it all. I stood and did absolutely nothing. I just watched them drop, one after the next, bang, bang, bang, bang. I was a fucking coward.’ More tears, and then more. ‘All I could think about was getting out of here; getting it done, going home, trying to forget any of it had ever happened. All the money I’d taken from him up until that point, all the shit he had me do, none of it was anywhere near as bad as this. I knew what I was doing for him wasn’t legal – but I wasn’t hurting or injuring people. I was just keeping him insulated. Because of his money, there was always someone out to get him, blackmail him, always someone trying to twist him in whatever direction they thought would get them what they needed – so that was all I was doing: twisting things back. It was mucky, it was grey, but it was never like this.’
He wobbled a little from side to side, the quiet filled by the sounds of the forest. ‘And then I came out here with him, and I watched him do this, and my complicity became the catalyst for him to tell me the truth, for him to reveal he was actually Adrian Vale. And that was what he wanted: he wanted to tell someone, because lies become so heavy, even if you’re as good at them as he was.’
I looked into the trees again.
I could see something now.
‘He was the devil.’
I could see the nine graves, shallow mounds against the forest floor, speckled white with frost.
‘I don’t sleep any more,’ Mills sobbed. ‘I just lay awake at night and I see the nine of them lined up here. I hear them too. That’s even worse, hearing them. I hear them crying and begging for their lives, and then the crying and the begging gets worse each time Vale kills one of them – they start moving around, running, going to one another – and then I remember Freda Davey was at the end of the line …’ He stopped, his speech fractured. ‘She just stood there, and turned and faced him before he shot her. She just looked him in the eyes.’
There was nothing except the sound of Mills crying.
No wind. No birds.
‘I stayed behind and buried them all,’ he whimpered.
I moved forward, towards the stream, knowing that there was no threat from Isaac Mills any more. Leaping from one bank to the other, I passed from the clearing back into the trees, the light closing off instantly above me. But I could see enough.
He’d made makeshift crosses for each of the graves.
My throat trembled with emotion.
I reached out to the nearest tree for support, my legs suddenly weak, tired in my muscles and sinew and bones in a way I couldn’t ever remember being. I’d found them, I’d got to the end – but it didn’t feel like a victory.
Only a loss.
And then I noticed something.
There were ten graves, not nine.
I turned and looked back through the trees towards Mills, across the stream to where he was still standing in the clearing, lopsided, suffering. In his face, though, it was obvious he knew exactly what I was thinking and what I needed to ask.
‘Who else did you bury with them, Isaac?’
He didn’t reply, just wiped his eyes.
‘Isaac? Who is
this?’
‘Kader,’ he said. ‘That one was Joline Kader.’
An Ending
2018
London | Two Weeks Ago
In the arrivals hall, she found Kevin Quinn waiting for her. He had a sign with her name on it, and was checking his cellphone with his spare hand.
‘DI Quinn?’
He looked up. ‘Detective Kader?’
‘Ex-Detective Kader,’ she replied, smiling.
Quinn returned the smile and they shook hands.
‘Once a detective, always a detective,’ he said.
‘Well, it’s very kind of you to agree to meet me, anyway.’
‘No problem. I’m as keen as you to find out what’s going on.’
He led her out of the terminal, across to an adjacent parking lot, and they talked politely about her flight, about her career at the LASD and LAPD, about his, in Manchester and then in London at the Met, and then Quinn said, ‘I just want to find out what the hell has happened here. Black Gale, Beatrix Steards, this case you had, it needs some closure.’
She nodded. ‘I agree.’
