by Tim Weaver
‘Bloody hell,’ the man said, catching his friend’s attention and pointing at the table. ‘Get rid of the queer boy and we’d do a bit of damage there, Woody.’
Rebekah shook her head. ‘Piss off, will you?’
‘What was that?’ the man said, leaning in to her.
‘I said,’ she responded, facing him down even though he was almost twice her size, ‘why don’t you two just piss off to the football?’
The man grinned again.
‘You got a filthy mouth,’ Woody – the friend – said, but the man shushed him. He and Rebekah were still staring at each other, his smile still there.
‘Just leave me alone,’ she said.
‘Women with mouths like yours are only good when you give them something to fill it with,’ the man said, sinking his beer. As he drank, he didn’t take his eyes off her. ‘You good on your back, love?’
This time, Rebekah chose not to reply, hoping her silence would defuse the situation. She glanced over her shoulder and could see everyone on the table deep in conversation, unaware of what was going on. But then Johnny looked out across the pub, searching the crowd for her, and they found each other.
‘I could teach you if you like,’ the man said.
‘Drop dead,’ she muttered.
‘Oooh, yeah,’ he fired back, looking at his friend, deliberately creasing his face into an expression of faux-ecstasy. ‘Oooh, dirty talk. I love it, darlin’.’ The two of them burst out laughing. ‘I bet you take it up the arse.’
The men wailed like hyenas.
Rebekah tried to get the barman’s attention.
Please come and serve me.
‘Seriously, though, do you take it up the arse, love?’
Please.
The men erupted into laughter again.
‘You all right, Bek?’
Rebekah turned to find Johnny standing at her right shoulder. He looked at the men, then at her. Johnny was no fighter, but in that moment she would rather have him at her side than not. He shuffled into the space between Rebekah and the men.
‘Cover your arse, Woody,’ the man said.
They laughed again but the mood had changed.
‘Looks like it’s queer o’clock,’ Woody chipped in.
‘Why don’t you guys just give it a rest?’ Johnny said.
‘Hello, it’s GI Joe.’
He tried again: ‘Just give it a rest, guys, okay?’
The man leaned all the way into Johnny, stopping so close to him that their noses were almost touching. ‘I’ll give it a rest whenever I fucking want to.’ He pushed Johnny in the shoulder. Johnny stumbled back, into Rebekah, who stumbled into the people next to her. Straight away, she could tell that Johnny hated this, that it scared him, that he was so far out of his depth he could barely see dry land – but he did what he had to do as her big brother.
He stepped forward again, into their space.
‘I think you need to calm down.’
‘Or what?’ the man growled.
‘Just …’ Johnny glanced at Rebekah.
‘Or what? You gonna fight me?’
Saliva speckled Johnny’s face.
‘You gonna fight me?’
‘Just leave her alone,’ Johnny repeated meekly, wiping the saliva away from his cheek. ‘Just go enjoy your soccer match and leave her alone.’
‘It’s football, you fucking bender.’
‘Whatever. Just leave her alone.’
‘Or what?’
‘That’s enough.’
‘Enough? I’ll tell you when it’s enou–’
Johnny grabbed the man by the neck, clamping his fingers around his throat. It happened so fast, the movement so quick and unexpected, that for a second Rebekah barely processed what was happening. She didn’t remember the last time Johnny had even so much as raised his voice – in twenty years, she was pretty certain he’d never raised his fists. When he was picked on at school, pushed around, he never fought back. Mike would tell him he needed to, but he wouldn’t. Except now he had: he was shoving the man to the floor, sending him crashing into a nearby table, stools toppling over, glasses smashing, the background music drowned in gasps and shouts from the bar staff.
Rebekah looked down at the man, splayed on the floor, his face a mix of shock and anger, and even as Johnny saw the bouncers rushing over, he wasn’t done: he went for the friend, Woody, grabbing him by the hair, by the excess skin at his neck, and throwing his head against the bar. Woody folded, like a piece of paper, his pelvis hitting the hardwood, his face smashing against the counter top, nose breaking instantly, blood spattering.
Johnny leaned over the man on the floor. ‘I’ll fucking kill you.’
He spat the words – violent, destructive – and of all the things that stayed with Rebekah about that night, two faces remained most vivid, even years on. First Johnny’s: there was corrosiveness behind his eyes, a rage that she’d not only never seen before but had believed he simply wasn’t capable of. It so shocked her that, in the hours afterwards, she convinced herself she must have been mistaken, that the emotion of the moment had skewed her memory.
And then there was the second, that of the man on the floor: Rebekah saw the fury in him, the violence he was capable of – but the moment he went to get up, the moment his eyes found Johnny, it vanished.
Johnny had made him cower.
As soon as the bouncers arrived, one grabbing Johnny’s arm, the other hauling the man up off the floor, everything altered, a fracture repairing itself: Johnny glanced at Rebekah and said, ‘I’m sorry, Bek.’ He was her brother again, panicked, worried, his voice small. He repeated himself as he was marched away, one of the bouncers already on the phone to the police.
But Rebekah never forgot that night.
Or the stranger who had been her brother.
44
The gas station was pitch black.
She flooded the forecourt office with light from the Cherokee, then hurried with Roxie around to the back. Once inside, Rebekah cranked on the generator, listened to it rattle out of its slumber, and then – as bulbs flickered into life above her – she went through to the front office.
She’d come armed with Stelzik’s laptop.
There was no juice left in the battery, so when she tried powering it on after plugging it in, she got no response. Tapping out an impatient rhythm on the desk, she felt Roxie brush past her legs, sniffing her way around the floor of the office. Rebekah looked down at her, and then her eyes drifted back to the denims she was wearing: she’d returned to her own clothes and, for the first time, saw what a state they were in. Blood. Mud. Grass stains. She’d torn one of the pockets on her first day here, so that it just flapped against the top of her thigh. As she thought of that, her mind went all the way back to what Johnny had told her. Tomorrow is the last day.
She didn’t know any more if it had been a mistake or a lie.
She switched her attention to the laptop and tried powering it on again. This time, it worked: the black screen turned white and it began to load.
As soon as it was done, she went to Stelzik’s email. When she’d used the laptop at the hostel, his Inbox had already been open, presumably because it had been left that way the last time the PC had gone to sleep. Now, though, because she’d been forced to reboot the laptop, she had to wait for the browser to fire up.
Once it had, she clicked on the shortcut for Stelzik’s Gmail and started scrolling through messages again. She wanted to make sure she’d been right the first time and there were no emails between Johnny and Stelzik.
There weren’t.
She checked Sent and Trash, then went through some of the colour-coded folders that Stelzik had created, and in which he’d stored things like important messages, research and scans.
Again, she found nothing.
Next, she went to the browser history.
The last three entries were all related to his email, and there was one entry each for Inbox, Trash and Sent.
/> Rebekah looked at the dates and times.
Saturday, 30 October.
14:45 through to 15:03.
She flashed on a memory of getting to the Cherokee after being left for dead in the forest, and of seeing 14:58 on the car’s clock. At that same time as she was bleeding, scared and confused, as she was wondering where her brother was, someone had come here, to Stelzik’s room, and spent eighteen minutes in his email. Between 14:45 and 14:56, they were in the Inbox; 14:56 to 15:00 in Sent; and the remaining three minutes were spent checking Trash. Had Johnny’s emails to Stelzik been deleted in those eighteen minutes? It made sense: if you were looking to delete emails, you’d go through the Inbox first, then check Sent, and then you’d make sure Trash was empty of them as well.
But who had deleted the emails?
Lima? Hain?
Johnny?
If it was Lima and Hain, why hadn’t they just taken the whole laptop or, at the very least, wiped the browser history? That would have meant fewer questions. As it was, it was still possible to track what had been happening on the PC that day.
There was another mystery too.
Wasn’t anyone missing Stelzik back in New York? He, like Rebekah, hadn’t come home on the last day of the season, so why hadn’t anyone he knew – or might have been in contact with – raised the alarm about him? Unlike in Rebekah’s case, the people he worked with would have known where he was. He’d have told them he was going to Crow Island.
But then she got her answer.
She’d missed it the first time, but now, as she looked again, she saw an email in the Sent folder she hadn’t paid attention to. It had gone out at 14:57 on 30 October. The timing coincided exactly with what Rebekah had already discovered in the browser history. More than that, it meant whoever had used the laptop hadn’t just been deleting emails.
They’d been using the account to write them too.
45
The email was to someone called Gideon Burrows at the Museum of Natural History. Stelzik – or whoever had pretended to be him – had told Burrows he’d decided to extend his stay on the island for a while longer, into the winter months, because he was on the verge of making ‘a big, very exciting discovery’.
I’ve arranged transport back to New York for when I’m finished. I’ll be in touch.
Sooner or later, when Stelzik didn’t resurface, someone would start to ask questions about what had happened to him. But maybe that was the reason why the laptop had been left. If it was still here, browser history intact, along with Stelzik’s clothes and belongings, it looked much less suspicious. His body was buried next to the tree roots in the forest, but if it was never found, there was no evidence he’d been murdered and, given his apparent decision to stay during the winter alone on the island, if he went missing the only logical conclusion was that he’d had an accident. She could hear her dad for a moment, ticking off the obvious outcomes people would reach: He slipped somewhere and knocked himself out. He fell into the ocean. Maybe they might even think he killed himself.
Rebekah found herself nodding, as if her father were in the room with her. Whatever Burrows and the rest of the staff at the museum thought was the reason Stelzik hadn’t returned, it tied into something else Hain had said to Lima on the night Rebekah had followed them to the beach: You brought the wrong car back. He’d wanted the Cherokee, not Stelzik’s Chevy: if the Chevy had been left behind, it would have played into the whole idea of Stelzik staying on, then perishing unexpectedly in some accident.
Rebekah checked through the Inbox again, through his address book, some of the folders he had with photographs in them, trying to figure out why no one except Gideon Burrows might miss Stelzik. But then it started to become clear: Stelzik wasn’t married, and he didn’t have kids. A family wasn’t looking for him.
She leaned back on the stool, away from the screen, disturbed by what she was seeing. Could Johnny really have been involved in this deceit?
Rebekah shook her head, wanting to rid it of the thought. But she couldn’t, not quite. There were just too many truths: she’d never seen her brother after she’d fallen into the gully; all the timings on Stelzik’s laptop lined up perfectly with the idea of him coming here; and the memory of what her brother had done that night in London still burned brightly. There was something else too, something to which she’d barely given any thought since it had happened: Kirsty’s call to Rebekah before she and Johnny had come out to the island. She’d said she’d wanted to talk about Johnny, and when Rebekah had asked Johnny about it, on the ferry over here, he’d told her he had no idea what Kirsty might have wanted. But was he lying about that too? Why would Kirsty want to talk about Johnny?
And then, as she looked at the laptop again, at the folders in Stelzik’s email, she remembered she hadn’t checked the Spam.
She opened it.
Inside, there was one message she hadn’t seen.
It had been sent to Stelzik on the afternoon of 29 October, the day before Rebekah and Johnny had arrived on the island. When they’d found Stelzik in the forest that first day, Rebekah had guessed, from the condition of his body, that he’d already been dead for twenty-four hours – so it was possible that Stelzik had never read this message. That would certainly explain why it was still in his Spam.
Not that there was much to read.
The email was empty.
Confused, Rebekah’s gaze went from the message window, up to the sender and their email address.
It took her a second to recognize the name.
And then her world fell apart.
Doubts
Travis had breakfast at his desk – his last ever Friday on the force – and spent three hours on the phone to the Metropolitan Police in London. Eventually, after being put on hold for what felt like the thousandth time, he landed up with someone who offered to help him. Inside a couple of hours, a copy of a two-decade-old arrest report dropped into his Inbox.
He started reading.
Johnny Murphy had never been charged, so the report was light on detail, but the bottom line was that he’d put one guy in hospital, and had told another that he would ‘kill’ him. Kirsty Cohen had told Travis that Murphy had been like a stranger, according to his sister, and the report backed that up. Murphy didn’t deny things had got out of hand, and that he’d gone too far – even accepted the blame for everything – but said the two men had been ‘aggressive and inappropriate’ towards Rebekah, and ‘it was clear that she was struggling to deal with it on her own.’ For some reason, Travis thought of the moment – right at the end of the video interview he’d done with Murphy – when he’d tried the old trick of prolonging the silence. Travis had made it uncomfortable and awkward, feeling certain that Murphy was the type of person who would hate stuff like that. But all Murphy had done was sit there quietly and wait for Travis. He’d tried to play Murphy.
But maybe Murphy had played him.
The doubts had their nails in him now. There was no denying the arrest report, no denying that somewhere in Murphy there was a man capable of violence. If you accepted that, you had to accept that he might have abducted Louise Mason. Because that was what this was: an abduction. It had been three months since she’d last been seen at the fundraiser. There had been no sightings of her at all. It was impossible to believe that this was a decision taken of her own free will.
Yet Travis had dismissed Murphy as a suspect back in October. His instinct, at the time, was that Murphy was telling him the truth. Character witnesses then – and character witnesses, like Noella Sullivan, even now – all said Murphy was a good guy. Travis had spoken to the hospital where Noella had been taken, and they’d confirmed that they encouraged patients and their families to switch off their phones in certain areas of the building, which was exactly what Murphy had done. That explained the missing two hours as well. Something else bugged Travis too: why leave the hospital to go all the way back to the hotel? Geographically, it was a huge hassle. It didn’t mean it hadn’t
happened – but Travis was wavering.
And, at the back of his head, there was something else nagging at him: all of this revised focus on Johnny Murphy had started with an anonymous call to his phone at work, in the middle of the night, from a man who didn’t want to leave his name or stay on the line. But because Travis had been so desperate for a break in the case, and because he was so short of time, he’d run with it.
Now he didn’t know who was telling him the truth.
He didn’t know who was lying.
And he had only four days left to get to the answer.
46
Rebekah stared at the name of the sender, at the email address of the person who’d contacted Karl Stelzik with an empty message.
Willard Hodges.
That was the name Gareth had been using on the cellphone she’d found in the car. The same email he’d been using to book hotel rooms on wine estates and buy clothes for another woman in high-end stores.
His alias. His secret identity.
The name he’d used for his affair.
She stared at the email, unable to process what it meant, tears welling in her eyes. ‘Are you really doing this to me?’ she said quietly.
First Johnny. Now this.
‘Are you really all doing this to me?’
She moaned the question into the silence of the gas station, then put a hand over her eyes, burying herself in the darkness.
But all she could see now was Gareth.
It was that day in the brownstone, when she’d got home and found him alone at the kitchen table with a bottle of bourbon. I’m sorry, Bek, he’d said to her. And then he’d told her Willard Hodges was just a name he’d made up.
Random.
Unimportant.
She opened her eyes again and looked at the screen.
Except it wasn’t unimportant at all. Gareth had contacted Karl Stelzik. But why? How would he have known Stelzik in the first place?
