by Tim Weaver
‘I always told your mom,’ Ira said, looking across at his son, his fingers moving from Ethan’s arm to his hand. ‘I always told her, “You’re the strongest person I ever met.”’
Jo looked at Ira, at a face she’d only been able to see in memories and photographs for so long, and suddenly some part of her knew this wasn’t real. She knew it was a dream, a fever, some sort of hallucination that would soon be over, because she could hear wind passing through the trees of a forest, and it was growing louder every second. But she didn’t care. Whatever this moment was, and however long it lasted, it was real enough.
It was Ira, and Ethan, and her.
It was her family as it was always meant to be.
For now, Joline Kader was home.
70
The car was coming from my right, a red blur emerging into view on the right-hand side of the lake. I picked up my pace again, waving my hands at it, trying to get the driver to see me through the trees, and then I slipped, stumbled, my hands hitting the ground, then my knees, and I slid forward and smacked into a tree. Not as hard as Jo had hit hers, but hard enough to wind me. It took me a couple of seconds to recover, and then I was back up again, finally moving from the forest into a sea of long grass. It whipped at me, frost-bitten, hard as glass, snow crunching under foot.
I looked for the car.
I could hear it but couldn’t see it.
Trying to run faster, I kept going, even as my feet slipped, even as my skin throbbed, red-raw from the cold. I could no longer see the road because I didn’t have the elevation of the slope: it was just sky above, hills emerging along the crown of the grass, and the slant of the forest behind me, its trees like the scales of a great dragon.
Faster.
Come on, you need to move fast –
I heard the car pass.
‘No,’ I shouted after it. ‘No!’
Ten seconds later, I broke through the grass, on to the road, but by then it was too late. The car was too far away already. I could see a shape inside at the wheel, and the registration plate on the back, and it took me a couple of seconds to process both. To start with, all I could do was watch as it disappeared around a bend in the road, like a vision that was never even there; but then, as everything went quiet again, as the hum of the engine vanished and I looked out across the stillness of the lake, as I realized the hills I’d seen ahead of me were actually mountains – huge, snow-capped – something started to dawn on me.
I looked left, to where the car had gone, and then right: half a mile away there was a road sign, small, impossible to read from here. I dumped my backpack, not wanting to be slowed down by it, and started running – as fast as I could – towards the sign.
And, as I ran, I remembered.
I thought of what Isaac Mills had said about the nine Black Gale villagers, and how Vale had spent two weeks bringing them here one by one. I remembered my own experience of getting here, of the one that Jo had described too: engine noise, a cramped, coffin-like space. We’d both been drugged, been confused, disordered, our eyes had been covered, our ears, our senses suppressed, but we remembered the coffin. And then I thought of Adrian Vale pretending to be Robert Zaid, getting away with the assimilation of someone else’s identity, and, despite Zaid’s huge wealth, choosing to work a day job at the Foreign Office. It had always sat uncomfortably with me, but I’d just come to accept that it was because those first ten years he spent abroad at embassies and high commissions gave Vale the breathing room he needed. It gave him the space to properly convince the world that he was Robert Zaid, before he returned home again. And maybe that was a part of it.
But it wasn’t all of it.
As I closed in on the road sign, I thought of the email I’d seen in Zaid’s house from a company called Parsonfield, and I remembered recognizing the name but not being sure from where. And then, finally, I thought of the sequence I could never figure out.
G76984Z.
I stopped in front of the sign, out of breath, nauseous, and looked at the name of the nearest town to here, and the number next to it, the distance I’d have to go to get there: 43. I could see the road unfurling ahead of me, a stripe of asphalt that extended so far into the distance, it eventually ceased to exist. There were no other cars coming. There were no towns anywhere close.
I dropped to my knees as everything rushed me at once: in the photograph I’d seen on the wall of his home, where he’d been standing in front of a Gulfstream jet, he hadn’t just bought the jet, he’d actually learned to fly it; the reason he worked at the Foreign Office was so he could gain a diplomatic passport, allowing him to bypass customs checks and luggage searches; Parsonfield wasn’t a company, it was an airstrip south of London; G76984Z wasn’t a map reference, it was the tail number on Vale’s Gulfstream; and it wasn’t a real coffin we’d been transported in, it was a compartment inside his jet.
And then there was the car that passed me earlier, that I’d missed as I’d run so desperately through the grass: it had been left-hand drive. Its registration plate had been foreign. It didn’t belong in the UK because we weren’t in the UK.
We were an ocean away.
I looked over at the forest where I’d left Jo, at the mountains, the lake, the absolute emptiness of the road, then at the sign, at the name of a town I’d never heard of and could hardly pronounce, forty-three kilometres away.
This was how Vale had made an entire village disappear. He must have realized it was how he could make anyone disappear.
This was his final, awful act of cruelty.
He hid his victims on a plane.
And then he killed them in another country entirely.
Part Ten
* * *
THE AFTERMATH
71
A month later, I met Ross Perry, Rina Blake and Tori Gibbs at Black Gale.
In the intervening period, the story about the village, about its connection to the abduction and murder of Beatrix Steards, about its tethers back to a double murder in Los Angeles in 1985 – and about the nearly forgotten ‘suicide’ of a young student in Sussex four years later – had already begun to burn out, the front-page headlines gone, the sensationalized accounts of what had happened all written.
The story, instead, had altered course.
It had become about Jo and me.
It had become about what happened to us after Vale was dead and Mills had killed himself. It was about what had happened to us as we’d tried to find our way out of the forest.
I’d spoken on the phone to Ross, Rina and Tori a couple of days after I finally got back to London. At the time, I was broken, barely functioning – physically and mentally – but I tried to give them the fullest and most detailed account I could stomach. The problem was, the lurid stories in the media had been so relentless in the time I’d been away that it became difficult to convince them that the whole truth wasn’t necessarily in the newspaper accounts they’d read, so I suggested we meet at Black Gale. It was the place where everything had begun, the village in which the four families had lived so happily. It seemed like a place where I could give them some facts, some colour, and help them find some closure.
Tori Gibbs arrived first.
It was a bright day in late May, the sun cresting the peaks of the Dales, and, as we waited for the other two, Tori and I talked about Adrian Vale, a man she’d spent the last four weeks researching and writing about. She’d been writing about her brother, about Laura and Mark, about the other Black Gale residents too, for her employer, FeedMe, in an attempt to give an accurate portrayal of who they were and what their lives had been like. A lot of the newspaper reporting about the villagers had been inaccurate, so it was an attempt to put the truth on record, and it was cathartic for her as well. But the Vale part of the story was harder to address because she was writing about a man for whom law and structure were just another lie.
His life as Robert Zaid – his casual murder of a fellow student back in 1989; the staggering act of b
ravura in becoming him – had fuelled much of what had run in the newspapers, on TV and online. I read and watched it all when I got back, every line on every page, every word out of the mouth of every reporter, dismissing the lies and using the rest to fill in some gaps and build a more reliable timeline of what I hadn’t known. Annabel told me that she’d contacted the police when she hadn’t been able to get hold of me for eight days, but hadn’t officially filed a missing persons report until three and a half weeks in: the catalyst for that had been an American woman, Jo, calling her up to ask her if she’d seen or heard from me. And, while the Met did begin a proper investigation, despite all my history with them, it took an anonymous call to my daughter four days later for the case to find any actual traction.
The anonymous caller had been Healy.
He’d told her to go back to the Met and tell them that they needed to look into Robert Zaid. He knew that was the last place I’d been seen, and although he didn’t know that Zaid was actually Adrian Vale, he knew I went there and never came back.
It had been a powerful, selfless act.
Annabel didn’t know who he was, so when she went to the police, she simply told them the truth: a man with an Irish accent had phoned her about me, and when the Met traced the call back from her landline, they zeroed in on a phone box in Luton. They sourced CCTV footage, and appealed locally for witnesses, trying to figure out what relationship the unknown caller might have had to Robert Zaid, and then finally they found something on film: the back of a man – possibly in his forties or fifties, skinny, shaved head, with stubble or perhaps a beard. They didn’t locate him, even after his picture ran in the papers.
But he was out in the open now.
And that made both of us vulnerable.
Yet Healy had put everything on the line by making that call, and he’d done it again in the days preceding it. He’d broken cover, gone to Yorkshire and got inside Isaac Mills’s home, looking for copies of the audio recordings from the village. Or, at least, one recording in particular: the one of him and me in the farmhouse, in the hour after hitting the deer, where I said he needed to hide or we were both going to prison. The one in which I said he was supposed to be dead.
He found the recording on Mills’s laptop.
Knowing that deleting the file wouldn’t necessarily put it out of reach for ever, especially if any forensic techs came looking, he took the whole laptop instead. Again, his sacrifice moved me, not because I believed it got us out of trouble, or even that I thought it was the best thing to have done, but simply for the fact that he’d done it at all. In all the miles we’d walked over the years, it had always felt like it was me bailing him out, me trying to prevent him from self-destructing, me keeping him from being swallowed by the shadows – but in doing what he did, it felt like a repayment in full. His actions didn’t insulate us and, in an uncomfortable parallel, in his faked death, in our lies, in our perpetual fear of being caught, neither of us was so far from the deceit that Adrian Vale had built his life on.
But there was one big difference.
Healy’s actions were altruistic and noble.
In a way, given the fact that his daughter was dead and he could never talk to his ex-wife or sons again, it had been a heroic act for the only family he had left.
The offices of Seiger and Sten were raided within two hours of the first interview I did with the police. Jacob Pierce had already fled, his money gone, but the cardboard boxes full of clothes had been left behind. It turned out that what Isaac Mills had told me before he shot himself was right: the clothes in the first cardboard box belonged to other victims. Some belonging to Jo Kader had been found too, added after she’d disappeared. What she’d been wearing the day that Mills picked her up at the airport was in there; so were her iPad and her mobile phone, both of them destroyed.
But the rest of her things, the clothes she’d brought in her suitcase, as well as the suitcase itself, were eventually, painstakingly, traced back to a charity shop nine miles from Heathrow, via CCTV footage. The video showed Mills dropping all of it off within hours of her arrival in the country, and the fact that police had done that, and gone to those lengths, explained exactly why Vale kept the clothes his victims were last seen wearing in storage at Seiger and Sten. It was an extra insurance policy. Missing persons investigations always started with a physical description and a note on what that person had been wearing when they vanished – but both were irrelevant if neither could be found. And maybe there was another reason too: Vale didn’t kill because he liked it or felt compelled to, but because it suited him, and it helped him. Was it so far-fetched to suggest that he might have kept the clothes for some other reason? Not as trophies, perhaps, but as reminders about the risks that came with living a life entirely built on a fiction.
One thing became obvious, though: the mud-spattered exercise gear I’d found in the box, the dresses and blouses, trousers and shoes, were all that remained of a business rival he’d had in the 1990s who had begun to get suspicious of him; a journalist who asked the wrong questions in 2002; and a man at the Foreign Office who saw something in Robert Zaid that wasn’t quite right – all of them buried in the forest, alongside nine innocent people from Yorkshire.
Jacob Pierce himself was eventually located trying to board a flight to Moscow. He’d chosen Russia because the country had no extradition treaty with the UK. In interviews, he admitted that he’d met Adrian Vale for the first time in 1987, when he still worked in London, and had then developed a relationship with him, especially after Pierce moved back to York and started Seiger and Sten. He said, before Isaac Mills, he’d recommended other men to Vale who had done the same job for Vale as Mills had been employed to do – solving problems, making them go away – but none could protect him entirely. Because of that, Vale would become frustrated, and then angry. Pierce described Vale as a black hole, an impossible force around which things simply disappeared.
On the same day that Jacob Pierce was arrested at Heathrow, Connor McCaskell left a message on my voicemail.
‘Wow, David, you’re back in the headlines again.’ He laughed, but it sounded forced, fraudulent. ‘Who would have thought that a psycho like Adrian Vale would be the least of your worries in that forest, right? I mean, once he was dead, once Isaac Mills had blown his brains out, I bet you thought your nightmare was finally over.’
I could hear telephones, voices, office noise.
‘Anyway, give me a call. Let’s talk.’
Another pause.
‘We can discuss the anonymous Irishman who phoned your daughter.’
After Annabel told them about Healy’s call, the Met had spoken to Robert Zaid.
He’d had a rock-solid alibi.
He told them he was out of the country the night I went missing, and claimed that, although I called his PA about arranging a meeting, I’d never confirmed. That last part wasn’t right, and in the end, once all the facts were known, it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. But it hung together well enough until I finally arrived back home.
Again, it showed just how confident Vale was, how audacious, how skilled as a liar, that he was able to convince the police. He spoke to them from Hong Kong, where he was attending a board meeting, and he offered them full access to his home and his office in London. He did that because, by that time, four weeks had already passed, and so memories of me were beginning to get sketchy among his staff. There was no record that any meeting had been officially scheduled with me, because he’d erased it from his systems, so while his PA remembered my call, the fact that my name wasn’t in Vale’s diary seemed to back up what he’d told the police about me never confirming. The two security guards who’d been there the night I went to his house didn’t know who I was because Vale had never told them, and his plans for me were part of the reason why he’d dismissed them so early that evening – so while they both vaguely recalled Zaid having a visitor, they couldn’t recall specifically on which night. Vale’s lie wasn’t watertight, but as
long as I never came back from the forest alive, it was a lie that would hold perfectly well, and that was all he needed. He and Mills had cleaned his house down after I was there, wiping surfaces, erasing prints, scrubbing and scouring until there was no trace of me left. Vale disposed of any paperwork that might hurt him, as well as email trails, footage from surveillance cameras at his home, anything with a link back to me and Black Gale, which was exactly why he was so confident about letting the police come to his home and his business.
Except they never did.
It was the word of an anonymous caller who they couldn’t trace, and – despite appeals for him to come forward – wouldn’t come up for air, versus Robert Zaid, international businessman, an official in the UK government, a man who’d donated millions to charity, who’d built an entire cancer research facility. Zaid was a person people liked and responded to. After it all came out in the press, colleagues of his, the men and women he worked with, were profoundly shocked by what they discovered.
They never would have picked him as a killer.
He was so charming.
He was so benevolent and big-hearted.
‘And that was how he got away with it,’ Tori said, the two of us leaning against the drystone walls that surrounded Black Gale. I just nodded, because she was talking to me about a man she’d read about and researched, not a man she’d encountered in the flesh. In her voice, I heard a weird mix of disgust and reverence, the confliction between a woman grieving the lost lives of her brother, sister-in-law and nephew, and the journalist trying to write about them. I didn’t blame her necessarily, because when someone you loved died, there was no right way to deal with it, but what I knew for sure was this: Tori hadn’t stood opposite him. She hadn’t seen the man Adrian Vale was. She could never fully understand the scale of what he’d done to Jo, to me, to all the others that he abducted and flew to that forest.
