by Tim Weaver
‘Patrick Perry was an old, uh … colleague.’ He hesitated and looked sideways at her, as if he wasn’t sure whether to reveal the true nature of his relationship with Patrick.
But it didn’t take much in the way of imagination to figure it out.
Quinn was a cop; Patrick Perry had been a journalist.
She held up a hand. ‘It’s okay. I had “colleagues” too.’
Quinn broke into another smile.
‘Thank you for digging me out of that one,’ he said.
‘Sure.’
‘So, after you leave London, you’re heading north?’
She nodded, following him into a packed elevator. ‘Hopefully you and I will be able to get somewhere with this Beatrix Steards stuff over the next couple of days – maybe look deeper into the connections between her and Black Gale – and then I’m going to get the train up to York, hire a car and take a drive out to the village myself.’
All of that was true – she’d just left out one thing.
Robert Zaid.
She hadn’t told Quinn what she knew.
She hadn’t told anyone that Zaid wasn’t Zaid.
Someone called David Raker had come looking at exactly the same things she had and now she couldn’t find him anywhere. The phone number she had for him went to voicemail. Her emails to him went unanswered. She’d managed to track down his daughter and she was in a state of absolute panic about where he was. She said her father had been silent for three and a half weeks, and he never went quiet on her for this long. The last time she heard from him, he told her he was back in London from Yorkshire, and was driving to Highgate for a meeting.
Highgate was where Robert Zaid lived.
They reached Quinn’s car and he loaded her suitcase into the back for her, and then asked if she wanted to check into her hotel first or just go straight to the station.
‘Straight to the station is fine,’ she said.
‘Straight to the station it is.’
‘A coffee might be good, though.’
He smiled. ‘The best jetlag cure going.’
They were soon heading east into London. As they drove, he told her there was a service station about ten minutes away where they could get some coffee, so as Quinn asked her about LA, and then started telling her about a trip he’d made to the city with his wife in 2016, Jo allowed herself a moment of peace: no Gabriel Wilzon or Donald Klein, no acid bath, no Beatrix Steards, no Black Gale.
No Robert Zaid.
No Adrian Vale.
She looked out the window, at a spring day full of watery sunlight and pale skies, and thought of Ethan, pictured him, Claire and Maisie at the kitchen table in their blue clapboard house in Oakland. She thought of the last time she’d been there with them for Christmas, how there had been so much laughter, so many times she’d held Maisie, or talked to Claire, and thought how lucky she was; so many times she’d sat and watched the outline of Ira in Ethan’s face and actions, and had to pause for breath to appreciate how blessed she was to have the family she did. In her quiet moments at night, alone in the bedroom they’d made up for her, Jo tried not to think about how different it might have been if Ira hadn’t died, not only because his death still hurt, even all these years on, but because there was a side to his passing that was hard to ignore: without it, she might have lost her son completely. And so the worst thing that had ever happened to her in her life had also made her better. It made those moments with Ethan possible, even so long after Ira’s passing, because Ethan remembered her being there for him, all the way along. But she’d only been there because Ira suddenly wasn’t.
It was something that she’d never quite reconciled.
Something brought her out of the moment, a twinge in her thigh, and when she checked the side of her pants there was a speck of blood on them. Confused, she looked out at the motorway, saw the signs for the service station pass them, and then she turned to Kevin Quinn. As she did, her vision spotted white, smearing and dimming.
‘I’m sorry,’ Quinn said.
She touched her thigh again.
‘What’s going on?’
And then she saw that he only had his right hand on the wheel. His other was at his side, his knuckles resting against the edge of his seat, a syringe inside his palm.
‘What the hell have you done?’ Jo said, her words slurred.
‘I’m sorry,’ Quinn said again. ‘I’m so sorry.’
For some reason, before the blackness, images of Ethan when he was a boy, of her standing in the doorway of his room looking in at his crib, blinked in front of her.
Her heart swelled with love for him.
For who he was, and who he’d become.
And then she slumped sideways against the door.
67
Mills fell to his knees, the gun resting against one of his thighs. He looked across at me, the two of us on either side of the stream: he was like a man who’d run a marathon, his breath coming in harsh, ragged movements that seemed to send convulsions through his body. He wiped an eye, and then again, blood mixing with tears, then said, barely audibly, ‘I picked her up from the airport.’ He sucked in another breath. ‘An old source of mine in North Yorkshire Police called me to say she’d started asking around about Beatrix and Black Gale, so I started digging into her phone calls. I could see she’d called Quinn.’ Another breath, so frayed and so broken, it was nothing but pain. ‘I pretended to be him. I got her to trust me.’
He knelt there and sobbed.
‘Vale decided it would be too dangerous to meet her himself,’ he said eventually, the blood in his mouth now, smeared across his teeth. ‘He suspected that she already knew who he was. He was supposed to come back to London for a couple of days midway through that five-week trip he made to see shareholders, but he cancelled it and stayed out of the country instead.’ He made a small sound, like a grunt; maybe a snort of disbelief. ‘All the shit he’d pulled over the years and you know something?’ He glanced at me. ‘He was scared of that woman. I think she was the only person he’d ever met who was as obsessive as him.’
Gabriel Wilzon and Donald Klein.
Thirty-three years, and she’d never let it go.
‘So he asked me to take care of it, to bring her here, and said he would finish the job when he was done with that work trip.’ He sniffed, using his wrist to wipe his nose, mouth, cheeks. ‘Any sounds you heard down in the hole, that was probably her.’
I remember the clunks, the hums.
I thought it had been a generator.
It meant Kader hadn’t been dead for long.
Maybe only days.
‘There’s a pipe in the hatch we kept her in,’ Mills said. ‘She would try to climb it.’ He looked past me, to Joline Kader’s grave. ‘She was a fighter, right until the end.’
To the end.
The wind rose and then settled again.
The trees moved.
I turned and took a few tentative steps back into the forest, closing the space between myself and the graves. Kader’s was slightly removed from the others, dug at a fractionally different angle, the wood of the cross newer, less battered by wind, by the rain that must have washed through here since the nine villagers were buried; by the frost, the snow, the pine sap. Beneath my feet, the ground was hard, my ankles aching, my legs as well, and so I dropped to a haunch in front of the mounds of earth and watched the wind move in again, the crosses all fluttering.
A gunshot ripped through the air.
Startled, I turned and looked back in the direction I’d come, out to the clearing in which I’d left Isaac Mills, but now he wasn’t standing, watching me, he was on the ground: one arm under him, the other still holding the gun, eyes gazing up at the sky.
I left the graves and headed back to him, looking down at his body, the top of his head a mess of brain and blood, and then closed my eyes, trying to regain some measure of composure. I felt like I wanted to hide. I wanted to cry. When I opened them again, I saw that he’
d taken the notebook out of his pocket and tossed it on to the ground.
It was the history of all this.
He’d made me write his confession.
The forest seemed to close in, the trees oppressive, and I backed away from Mills, from the graves, as if I needed some distance just to find my breath again.
And then I saw something.
The padlock for the shack was lying on the floor.
Realizing that Mills must have unlocked it when I’d been on my haunches at the graves, I moved slowly towards the wooden building, the door fanning back and forth in the breeze, and stopped at the entrance.
Inside was a fire, empty and unlit, a few shelves with a mix of old tin cans and rusting metal equipment on them, and then a chair in the corner, chained to the wall.
On the chair was a woman, gagged and bound.
I recognized her instantly.
‘It’s okay,’ I said, holding up a hand.
She blinked, watching me, still uncertain if I was her enemy, her face streaked with dirt and blood, a lilac bruise below her cheekbone.
I took another, even smaller step forward.
‘Honestly, it’s okay,’ I repeated. ‘I’m not going to hurt you, Joline.’
68
We covered Mills’s body with the groundsheet, took his notebook and went back to the house, following the vague path through the frozen trees. Neither of us said much about how we’d got here, but Kader – Jo, as she told me to call her – knew as much about me as I did her. It was enough for us to see clearly: we’d both gone looking for answers – we’d just been at opposite ends of Adrian Vale’s life.
At the house, we patched ourselves up using a first-aid kit in the living room, and then I found some food in the kitchen and we ate out of cans in front of the fire.
‘Do you know where we are?’ Jo asked.
I shook my head. ‘No. Do you?’
‘No.’
I’d searched the house properly and had found a small, open lockbox in one of the wardrobes, but all it had in it was a car key for a Ford, and an old Nokia mobile phone, pre-touchscreen, with a black-and-white display. It was working, the battery charged, but there was no reception. Neither Vale nor Mills had brought anything else with them. Any wallets, IDs or bank cards they might have had must have been back at the car, which suggested they’d walked out here to the house, not expecting to be long. The question was in what direction they’d come. In her search, Jo had found a wrinkled, yellowing piece of paper with a hand-drawn map on it. It looked like it was Isaac Mills’s writing and it appeared to show a path through the forest in a northerly direction, skirting the clearing and the shack next to the grave site. Yet I could tell, even without knowing her at all, that Jo was just as concerned about how we found our way out of the forest as I was: the map was a start, perhaps better than nothing, but it was still lacking in detail.
She moved in her seat, wincing.
Her wrist was sprained and she’d broken a finger.
‘When he got me out of that hatch, I fought like hell,’ she said quietly, her fork clinking against the tin of the can. ‘He kept telling me, “Don’t fight me, don’t fight me, I’ve got a plan,” but what was I supposed to think? This was the same guy who’d picked me up at the airport; the same guy who’d talked to me over the phone, pretending to be Kevin Quinn, and who told me he’d show me the Beatrix Steards case.’ A flicker of torment in her eyes. ‘Twenty years ago, even fifteen, I’m not sure I would have fallen for that crap. But I’m sixty-seven. I’m retired. Before this, I spent two and a half years having lunches, going to Pilates classes, meeting for coffee and playing golf. I spent two years having holidays with my son and his family. And before any of that, I was teaching for twelve years. I’d lost my edge. That drive, that obsession, that sense of debt, it never leaves you, but when you’re not doing it every day, you do lose something. I don’t know if it’s focus. It’s more like a loss of altitude.’
‘The bigger picture.’
She nodded.
‘So you injured yourself fighting Mills?’
She looked at her bandaged wrist. ‘Yeah. Like I said, I fought like it was my last breath. I fought him so hard. Eventually, he got me in the face.’ She gestured to a bruise on her cheek. ‘Hell, he hit me so hard, it almost knocked my teeth out, and then he walked me into the forest, staying behind me with a gun to the back of my head, and told me he had a plan and I needed to play along.’
Mills’s plan was to use me.
He couldn’t release himself from Vale’s grip because the moment he did, Vale would ruin him. Whether Vale really had kept a record of everything that Mills had done for him – as he’d claimed to Mills – was debatable, as it would be a huge risk to keep that sort of information lying around, but what was undeniable was that Adrian Vale had the money and power to leak, expose and manipulate the narrative when it came to Isaac Mills. And actually going as far as killing Vale himself represented no sort of escape either: his death would invite the police in, and the police would find Mills.
With me, though, maybe he’d thought he had a chance.
I was pretty much the same build as Vale, so physically I wouldn’t instantly be overwhelmed, and if Mills released me from the hatch early, I’d have another advantage, because Vale wouldn’t see me coming. And if it all went to plan and I got the drop on Vale, Mills could immediately get back to London and begin the process of insulating himself from whatever Vale had on him before anyone even got a sniff that Vale – or Robert Zaid – was dead. It wasn’t foolproof. It was, in fact, treacherous and difficult, but it was better than the life he was having to lead.
A life of lying, and of hurting people.
A life of burying bodies in a forest.
It was, though, a plan with one unanswered question: what had Mills intended to do with Jo and me? He hadn’t wanted to kill us, that much was clear, but if we were still alive, we could tell the world what he’d done and been a part of, regardless of how much of it he managed to erase from history in the time it took us to find our way home again.
Maybe, in the end, he didn’t know.
The man I’d followed to the mill that day, the man he’d been around Melia and her children, the man who didn’t want to hurt Jo, who apologized to her even as she blacked out in his car, wasn’t a murderer. But he was a survivor. He wanted to break free. He wanted a different life. He wanted to love someone. He wanted to be normal. When he’d made a run for it into the forest, even after he’d been stabbed by Vale, he was still thinking about the plan. The blood, the pain, it skewered his perspective entirely, his sense of what was possible from that point on. But then, when I’d caught up to him, reality had finally kicked in. He had a knife in his gut. He was dying in the middle of nowhere. He wasn’t going to make it home to Keighley, to Melia, to her kids. The plan had failed.
All he could do was make his side of the story clear.
That was what the notebook was for.
‘He dug a grave next to the others,’ Jo said quietly, bringing me back into the half-light of the house, ‘and then he went out and shot a deer. I had no idea what he was doing, but he dragged the deer back, skinned it, and then dumped it into the grave, before filling it all in again.’
I thought of the deer I’d hit with my car right back at the start of the case. If I hadn’t done that, I might never have met Mills at all.
‘After that,’ Jo went on, ‘he bound and gagged me and left me in this hollow. It was about forty feet from the clearing, behind that shack there, and it was full of fallen branches and sticks; leaves, mud. He told me that if I wanted us both to live, I had to stay quiet, whatever I heard.’ She stopped, putting the can down, the glow from the fire like pigment on her skin. ‘I heard him bring Vale down. They stood somewhere close to the graves and Mills told him that I’d pretended to be sick, and that was why he’d got me out of the hatch; then, once I was out, I’d made a break for it into the forest, and – after a long chase – he�
��d ended up having to shoot me. And that was when I felt the change. I’m not even kidding. I was forty feet away and it was just like static; you could feel Vale’s rage like moisture in the air.’
She was silent for a moment, the fire crackling.
‘Mills kicked some of the earth away, to show Vale the corpse, and that was when I realized what the deer was for. It was still bloody, fresh, and mixed with mud, I guess its belly would have looked enough like a human’s.’ She glanced at me, as if she were still struggling to understand her feelings towards Isaac Mills. ‘Vale went insane. It was scary just listening to it. But that’s what I did. I lay there under all the shit that Mills had covered me with, and I listened to that beast ranting and screaming, telling Mills he’d screwed up, that I was his, not Mills’s. “That bitch was mine”: that’s all he kept saying – “That bitch was mine” – like I was some part of his destiny. Maybe I was, I don’t know. Maybe, if you believe in that stuff, he and I were always meant to meet each other, and – when we did – one of us wasn’t leaving again, but all I kept thinking as I lay there was, “I could have stopped this. I could have stopped this fucking monster thirty-three years ago.”’
She was quiet for a while.
I put some more wood on the fire, stoked it a little, and thought about what to do next. It was five thirty in the afternoon now, and there was no way we could head out into a forest this massive and this dense with night only a few hours away.
We’d have to go at first light.
‘Mills came back for me later, got me up and locked me in that shack,’ Jo went on, her eyes on the flames licking the chimney, ‘and when I tried to ask him what was going on, tried to talk through the gag, he just told me to stay put and stay quiet, and then he left me. I had no clock, no way of knowing how long I was there, but it must have been a day. I saw a sunrise and a sunset. And then, finally, I heard some voices.’
Mills and me.
‘Do you remember much about how you got here?’ she asked.
‘This place?’ I shook my head. ‘You?’
