I Am Missing: David Raker Missing Persons #8

by Tim Weaver

  At the edges of Sophia, things gradually started to change. There were no trees on the islands, other than the ones that had been planted, so the buildings were all constructed from imported timber and finished in tin. Red and green metal roofs were everywhere, scattered in asymmetrical lines, the layout of the town formless and difficult to get a handle on.

  The place seemed like a maze, its narrow streets filled with clapboard walls and sash windows, with enclosed porches and metal picket fences. It could have been pretty – maybe was once, a long time ago – and it put me in mind of the villages close to where I’d grown up in south Devon: their tight corners, their tricky passing spaces, the way they climbed and descended and almost never ran flat. But the villages of my childhood had been picturesque, neat and elegant, and here the buildings looked grubby, stained, the windows opaque with all the grime and salt and dust that blew in from the ocean and off the mountain. In the middle of the town, the shops and the only pub were run-down. Paint was peeling, wood was blanched, metal rusting. I saw a community centre beyond the pub and an unattractive utilitarian school building. Everywhere was deserted.

  ‘Here we are, then,’ the taxi driver said.

  He pulled up outside a supermarket called Empress Stores. In its window I could see Mount Strathyde reflected, a towering presence over the town, its crest like the vertebrae of some sleeping leviathan.

  ‘You sure you want to be dropped off here? I mean, I’m from St George, so I’m biased, but it’s a lot more fun than Sophia.’ He smiled, but then the smile disappeared as he looked out at the high street. I watched him, his eyes skirting the buildings. ‘It’s just, not many people come here. Certainly not mainlanders like you.’

  I looked along the row of the shops, to the streets and alleys that coiled off the empty high street in intricate zigzags; I glanced at the hills beyond the town, to the peaks of Strathyde again, to the trails marked along its flanks like wounds.

  I thought of Beth, and of Penny.

  I thought of Richard.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said.

  This is exactly where I need to be.

  57

  The driver directed me to a bed and breakfast a couple of streets away, run by a couple in their sixties. It was on a narrow, sloping road, with views south across the town. The accommodation was small and old-fashioned – floral duvet sets; vinyl wallpaper; furniture that creaked even when it wasn’t being used – but it was clean. I didn’t plan to be here longer than I needed to.

  There was no television and no Wi-Fi, but I had a signal on my phone and the 3G worked, if slowly, so I went hunting for Bill Presley, Jack Kilburn and Anthony Jessop. Jessop was the hardest of the three to find anything on, but Bill Presley I found almost instantly.

  His photograph was on the Royal Empress Islands Police Force website, in a gallery listing staff. The force had twenty serving police officers – thirteen constables, two sergeants, two inspectors, two superintendents and a chief constable. There was a superintendent each at the St George and Sophia stations, of which Presley was one, and – because both towns, though on different islands, were central in terms of the archipelago’s geography – St George looked after the eastern islands, and the Sophia police had responsibility for those to the west of it.

  Even so, Sophia was a much smaller station and a much smaller force. Its building was located about a quarter of a mile from the bed and breakfast, inside a converted sheep-shearing shed. It was north of me, so I couldn’t see it from my window, but there was a photo of it online and it looked like it would be hard to miss: built on the same slope that the B&B was on, it was perched on big, trunk-sized stilts, parking bays below it, and made from bright blue corrugated-metal sheets.

  I studied Presley’s picture.

  There wasn’t much of Richard in his face, except maybe a hint in the eyes and around the mouth, and the same hair colour. But Presley had started to lose his, a circle of it vanishing from the top of his skull, so what remained took on the appearance of a red halo. Elsewhere, though, he and his son shared more similarities: they were built the same way – trim, in good shape – and they had the same slight flaw in one of their front teeth, a canine that grew crookedly.

  I saved the picture and started on Jack Kilburn. According to Beth, he ran the town council, so I used that as a jumping-off point. But while I managed to source some articles from the Empress Express, all of which carried his name – reports of council meetings, of motions that had been carried – there were no pictures of him. When I tried to recalibrate the search and went looking for him as a farmer, I got nothing; when I used Beth as the foundation for another search, thinking Kilburn may have featured in stories about her going missing from the islands, quoted as a concerned parent, there was nothing. The whole thing seemed to have been missed by the paper, or was maybe never brought to their attention in the first place.

  In the end, I only found one thing: a small obituary in the Express.

  FIONA VIOLET KILBURN

  b. 20 April 1959, d. 13 November 2011

  Fiona Kilburn, who died yesterday after a short battle with cancer, aged fifty-two, was a well-known figure in Sophia, thanks in part to her work in raising money for the Empress Hospital extension. Not a native islander – she emigrated from London with her family in October 1984 – she nevertheless embraced life here and, indeed, found herself written into the pages of its history – though perhaps not for the happiest of reasons – when her first husband, Caleb Beck, the Cabot Island farmer, disappeared in July 1987. Although Beck was never located and was eventually declared dead, Fiona found happiness again in January 1993 when she married another local farmer – and current Sophia town council chairman – Jack Kilburn. She is survived by Jack, her daughter Penny, who lives and works in the UK, and her stepdaughter Beth.

  Everything that was underlined in the article led to a page full of related stories. I clicked on Jack Kilburn, but all I found were articles I’d already seen, and realized I was going around in circles. I was also beginning to flag. I’d been up since the early hours of the morning and hadn’t slept properly for the best part of three days. I still had a headache. It felt like every inch of my chest, back and arms was bruised. I wanted to make the best use of the time available to me, but I knew if I wasn’t functioning properly, if I could barely stay awake, I’d make mistakes.

  So I closed my eyes.

  I expected to sleep for a couple of hours, but when I woke it was after 4 p.m. and I realized I’d wasted most of the day. Frustrated with myself, I grabbed my coat and headed out.

  It was still three hours from sunset, but because of the rain and mist the light had already begun dying in the sky. Much of the town was lit, not by street lights, because there weren’t any, but by the glow of windows and doorways. I’d been hoping to find somewhere to eat, but all the shops were closing for the day or already shut, there were no restaurants, and I discovered that the pub didn’t serve food. A couple of times, I saw people fall into line behind me, or their eyes fix on me from across the street, and I became worried that I was being followed or watched, so rather than get lost in the labyrinthine streets, I found my way back to the pub again and went inside.

  It was like a wormhole to the seventies, a mix of dark wood and geometric patterns. Everything smelled musty, the furniture retaining the scent of cigarette smoke and spilled beer. At the bar, a few men were perched on stools, their backs to me as they leaned over their pints, but apart from them and a guy wiping down glasses, it was quiet.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the guy behind the bar said.

  I asked for a bottle of beer and some peanuts. A few pairs of eyes pinged to me at the sound of my accent. The one on the stool nearest to me, a man in his fifties with a hard, weather-beaten face and straggles of black hair snaking out from under a woollen beanie, said, ‘So you over from the motherland then?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  I eyed him, and then glanc
ed beyond to the other guys at the counter. None of them was looking at us but they were all listening.

  The barman brought my beer over.

  ‘I’m here to see the wildlife,’ I said.

  58

  When I got back to the bed and breakfast, Mrs Smart, the woman who ran it, was already setting the table for the next morning. Evidently, it was just me: one table at a bay window.

  ‘Would you mind if I asked you a question?’ I said.

  She was small but sprightly, her eyes bright, her hair tightly curled. ‘Yes, of course you can, son,’ she replied, and set all the cutlery down on top of the table.

  ‘Do you know a guy called Anthony Jessop?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘What about Jack Kilburn?’

  She looked at me, her expression neutral, obviously waiting to see where I went next.

  ‘I think he runs the town council here,’ I added.

  She sniffed, cleared her throat.

  ‘What’s he got to do with anything?’ she said.

  I couldn’t quite get the measure of her. Her words made it sound like she didn’t like him, or perhaps had an opinion on him, but her face remained blank.

  ‘I was just curious about him.’

  ‘Right.’

  She hadn’t swallowed the lie.

  ‘So do you know him?’

  ‘I know of him,’ she said.

  ‘Any idea where he lives?’

  She shook her head, still watching me. ‘I don’t get involved in things like the town council. Me and Harold, we keep ourselves to ourselves.’

  I nodded, looking at the solitary table, and changed tack.

  ‘What do you make of the stories?’ I said to her, gesturing to the back of the house where the rear windows looked up the slope, towards the mountain.

  She frowned. ‘Stories?’

  ‘About what exists up there.’

  Her expression cemented.

  ‘I wouldn’t go asking questions like that, son.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘What I mean is, don’t go asking questions like that out there.’ She nodded through the window to the town, its gathering blackness perforated by only a few tiny dewdrops of internal light. ‘This place has got a way of swallowing you up if you do.’

  She scooped up the cutlery and then stopped, staring out of the dark windows at the front of the house: they’d become hard to see out of, but would have been easy to see into.

  ‘Follow me,’ she said, and we headed into the hallway, where she put the cutlery down on an oak dresser wedged in under the staircase, and checked that we were out of range of the bay windows. ‘Look, here’s what I know, okay? Before we started running this place, my Harold, he used to be the coroner here. I mean, he wasn’t qualified as a coroner – he’s just a GP – but when someone died, Harold would often be the first person to look at the body.’

  She stepped closer, literally looking over her shoulder this time.

  ‘He won’t like me mentioning this,’ she said, her eyes still on the door that connected the front part of the house to the annex in which they both lived, ‘but one time, he said he overheard Jack Kilburn and Bill Presley talking at the morgue.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About someone called Selina Torres.’

  I paused. Selina Torres. She was mentioned in No Ordinary Route.

  ‘I’ve read about her,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah? Well, whatever you’ve read, I doubt it’s the truth.’

  ‘Miranda?’

  It was her husband, calling from the annex.

  ‘Do you know where my reading glasses are?’

  ‘Coming!’ she said.

  She leaned in to me, putting a hand on my arm.

  ‘Harold doesn’t talk about it because he says the walls in this town have ears. But if you want to know who Kilburn and Presley really are, I reckon you have to look into what happened to Selina Torres.’

  59

  I returned to my room, unable to persuade Mrs Smart to expand any further. Her husband had come in from the annex to see where she was, and she’d beamed an immediate goodnight to me – as if we’d had no conversation at all – and then shooed her husband back through the door, telling him to be more careful with his glasses.

  I didn’t get far using my phone either. The connection was painfully slow, which didn’t help, but there were hundreds of women called Selina Torres, hundreds more by the time I combined search results from English-and Spanish-language sites, and I couldn’t find an immediate connection between any of them and either the islands or the four men on my radar.

  When I finally called it a night, I looked out of the windows, across the absolute black of the fields between the B&B and Blake Point, and spotted the Olympia. In the dark, it seemed so far away it was like it was on another planet: the vague hint of cabin lights winking on and off; rows of bulbs at the railings like pinpricks puncturing the night; a tiny wash of alabaster where the outer decks were all illuminated. By tomorrow afternoon it would be gone, Beth along with it.

  Then I really would be alone.

  By the morning it had stopped raining, but a thick fog had rolled in, sitting like a ceiling above the town and shielding the entire mountain from view. I’d thought the night before about heading up into the hiking trails first thing and seeing if I could find the tarn and the cabin, but I needed better weather. It was dangerous to be on a mountain in fog, more dangerous when I had no real idea where I was going. It wasn’t like I could ask the local population for a map, either. So, for now, I went to breakfast, which was served by Mrs Smart as if our conversation of the night before had never happened, and then headed out.

  The streets were mostly quiet, except for tin roofs popping and shifting in the wind, but it was bitterly cold, and, as I walked, I saw flutters of snow in the air. The police station was about a ten-minute walk away, in a small cul-de-sac all by itself, with an additional car park opposite and an empty field full of patchy grass at the end. Two men in uniform were standing out front smoking, laughing about something, but when I got close to the stairs, they stopped and just watched me.

  Inside, the reception area was small. Cut into a dividing wall was a sliding glass panel on a timber countertop; behind the glass was a uniformed officer.

  He pulled the panel aside. ‘Yes, pal?’

  ‘I’m looking for Superintendent Presley.’

  The problem I was always going to face here was that my accent gave me away the moment I opened my mouth. He came forward a little further on the stool he was on, elbows pressed to the counter, and said, ‘Why’s that then?’

  ‘It’s a personal matter.’

  His eyes narrowed, and he made no effort to disguise the fact that he was looking me up and down, presumably trying to figure out if he recognized me, or if we’d ever met.

  Or if I was the man he’d been warned about.

  Finally, he said, ‘Superintendent Presley called in sick.’

  ‘Really?’ I eyed him. ‘Nothing serious, I hope.’

  He shrugged. ‘Just a cold, I think.’

  I thanked him and headed back down the slopes to the high street, watching for signs of a tail. Stopping outside the supermarket, I could see that there was a girl inside – sixteen or seventeen – serving at the till. There was a manager too, a burly guy in a fawn shirt and white butcher’s apron, unloading boxes. I counted two customers at the counter, talking to each other.

  As soon as they left, I headed in.

  I couldn’t see the manager now, but could hear him: there was the clatter of things being moved – reordered, stacked – coming through from the back.

  ‘Morning,’ I said to the girl serving.

  ‘Hello,’ she replied. ‘How are you?’

  There was a warmth to her greeting that I hadn’t expected, and hadn’t yet experienced in Sophia. Maybe that optimism was something that got ground out of you the longer you remained here.

  I struck up a co
nversation with her, trying to keep my voice down so the guy out the back wouldn’t hear, and told her I’d popped up from the ship to have a look around. I thought about Presley, Kilburn and Jessop. They’d definitely know by now that Alexander Marek had failed, so was that the reason Presley had called in sick? If they knew I was here, what were they waiting for?

  Maybe it’s time to draw them out.

  ‘I’m actually here to see some friends,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, really?’ she replied. ‘Who?’

  ‘Bill Presley, Jack Kilburn and Anthony Jessop.’

  Her face brightened. ‘Cool.’

  ‘You know them?’

  ‘I know Bill. My mum used to work as a secretary at the police station.’ She paused. ‘You know Bill is in charge of the police, right?’

  ‘I do, yeah.’

  ‘He’s really nice.’

  I nodded enthusiastically. ‘He’s a great guy.’

  ‘So you’re meeting up with him while you’re here?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing,’ I said, and started fiddling around for my notebook. I pretended to check its pages. ‘He gave me his address – but I think I might have written it down wrong because I can’t actually find it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And I don’t have his number.’

  The girl frowned. ‘I’m pretty sure he’s out near the library.’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘that rings a bell. He said he was out that way.’