I Am Missing: David Raker Missing Persons #8

by Tim Weaver

She broke into a smile.

  ‘What about the other two guys I mentioned?’

  ‘Did you say one of them was called Jessop?’

  ‘Anthony Jessop, yeah.’

  ‘I haven’t heard of him – but I know Mr Kilburn. He comes in here a few times a week. He’s really nice too. I’m not sure where he lives, though. Brian will know,’ she said, pointing towards the door at the back of the store.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, thanking her again and heading out.

  It was time to pay Bill Presley a visit.

  60

  It took me a while to find Presley’s home.

  The library turned out to be three Portakabins in a gravel car park on the edge of town. It was unattractive but had stellar views: to the south, I could see the Olympia anchored half a mile out into the ocean; to the north, the sweep of Mount Strathyde; to the west, the rest of Sophia, built into its slopes; to the east, hundreds of islands and the suspension bridge that connected Sophia to St George.

  The further out of town I got, the more the houses started to spread out, and Presley’s was in a cluster of three others. Despite the extra land out here, the design remained the same: red metal roofs, timber walls, sash windows, picket fences. On the side of his house, he’d built a car port, the roof made from more tin, the supporting beams from bicycle tyres, stacked on top of each other. It looked untidy and makeshift, which kind of summed up the house itself.

  Out the front, Presley was written on an American-style mailbox.

  On the walk across, I’d thought about how to approach Presley, about what sort of threat he might pose to me, but I kept coming back to what Beth had said on the ship: the account she gave me of how Richard had come down one night and found his father drunk and unconscious at the kitchen table, fresh from an IM conversation with Roland Dell. I remembered what he’d said to Dell.

  We’ll go to hell for what we did.

  That didn’t suggest someone whose thinking was straight. It didn’t point towards a man as cold-blooded as Roland Dell, who could easily bury the events of the past. If Presley wasn’t a weak link, it seemed he was teetering on the edge, his conscience struggling to cope. The more I thought about it, the more it felt like Bill Presley might be my way in.

  That didn’t negate the threat he posed, though, and I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to go to his place of work and then knock on his front door. But I was banking on two things: he’d grown weak under the weight of his secret; and he loved his son, above all else.

  I tapped on the door.

  A Toyota Land Cruiser was in the port and I could see part of the front room: an electric fire, a mantelpiece with some photos on it, a television on a wicker table in the corner. When I knocked a second time and got no answer, I took a step back and peered further into the house. Some sofas. An oak dining table. A big, grey-blue armchair beside the fire.

  In the armchair was a woman in her fifties, looking right at me.

  I’d never seen her before in my life, but I knew instantly it was Carla Presley: if Bill Presley had only carried faint facial hints of his son, Carla was the opposite. It was like looking at Richard, or a feminized version of him. The shape of the jaw, the nose, the bone structure – it was all the same. I inched to my left so she came into clearer view through the glass, trying to reassure her that I wasn’t a threat, but the only thing that followed my movements were her eyes.

  That was when I remembered what Beth had told me.

  She’d had a stroke.

  For the first time, I saw that the left-hand side of her face had sunk a little. Not much, but enough: around the lips, above and below the line of the mouth. In every other part of her body, she was totally motionless. I wasn’t sure how much or how little she could move, but her hands were linked together in the lap of her pleated skirt, her feet parallel to one another on the carpet, and her head was back, perched against the top of the chair. She had long brown hair, untied, which cascaded past her shoulders.

  ‘Mrs Presley?’ I said through the glass, and stepped closer.

  I dug around in my pocket for a business card, not because I thought she’d be able to see it from where she was, but because I was waiting for any reaction from elsewhere in the house; a response to the sound of my voice. I listened for creaks, looked for movement in the kitchen or hallway – but there was nothing.

  Could Bill Presley be hiding and listening?

  ‘I’m not sure if you can see this,’ I said, pressing the business card to the window, ‘but my name’s David Raker. I’m an investigator from the UK.’ I checked the living room again. ‘I’m here to talk to you about your son, Richard.’

  Something moved in her eyes.

  ‘May I come in, Mrs Presley?’

  I waited. Slowly, her right hand lifted an inch from her lap, her fingers shaking, and she pointed in the vague direction of the front door. It had been a fractional movement, nothing more than that, but it seemed like she was straining every sinew to do it.

  ‘I’m coming in, okay?’ I said, and opened the door.

  Warm air rolled out like a wave. I wiped my feet on a mat inside the door and pushed it shut. Ahead of me was the hallway, a staircase to the right, with a stairlift built into it. I paused there for a moment, out of sight of Carla Presley, listening again for sounds from upstairs. But the house was silent except for the soft tick of a clock and the hum of the electric fire in the living room.

  She watched me enter, her body able to turn only slightly, her eyes doing most of the work. I removed my coat and laid it across a nearby chair and then perched myself on the edge of one of the sofas, just across from where she was. I looked from her to the mantelpiece, where photos were lined up in frames. They all had Richard in them: him as a young boy; him as a teenager with his parents; him, alone, in his twenties.

  ‘Thank you for letting me in, Mrs Presley.’

  She swallowed, blinked.

  ‘Is Mr Presley home today?’

  A minor shake of the head.

  ‘He’s out?’

  A partial nod of the head. Yes.

  ‘Is he at work?’

  She blinked. Yes.

  Except he wasn’t. So it meant he’d lied to his wife and lied to the people at the station. The question was why. Had he gone to find the other men?

  Were they coming for me?

  I returned my attention to Carla, realizing that this was already a dead end. But then, as we locked eyes again, I felt a stab of sadness and a moment of guilt: she didn’t know where her son was, or what had happened to him. After he was found, no one on the islands had come forward to claim him as one of their own, which suggested the news about him hadn’t made it home – or, if it had, it was covered up by people like Kilburn and Jessop before it could spread any further. The saddest thing was that Presley was likely involved too, erasing his son’s life from the record down here. Perhaps when Presley told Dell they were going to hell for what they’d done, he wasn’t only talking about Penny, or the ghosts they might have left up at the tarn. Maybe he was also talking about the way he’d treated his son.

  Glancing at the photographs of Richard and his father on the mantelpiece, I said, ‘As I was saying, I’m an investigator from London.’

  Her eyes stayed on me.

  ‘I don’t know whether you know this, but your son Richard is in the UK.’ I paused, watching her for a reaction again. She started shaking her head.

  ‘You had no idea he was there?’

  Another small shake of the head.

  ‘You know nothing about what happened to him?’

  No.

  ‘You just thought he’d disappeared?’

  Yes.

  I got out my notebook. I didn’t need reminding about the case, I just needed time to think about the best approach.

  ‘Richard came to me nearly two weeks ago to ask for my help. At some point, he had an accident and hit his head. He’s fine,’ I said, holding a hand up, trying to reassure her, ‘except …�
� I stopped. Except he wasn’t fine at all.

  A hint of a frown. Except what?

  ‘I’m afraid he’s lost his memory.’

  She seemed to flinch.

  ‘He has a condition called “dissociative amnesia”. He has no knowledge of who he is or where he came from. He doesn’t remember you or your husband.’

  No.

  She tried to shake her head in disbelief.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that.’

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, filling the silence now.

  She swallowed again and tears broke from her eyes. Nothing else moved, just them. As saliva gathered at the corner of her mouth, I could see the frustration in her eyes, could see her twitch with the irritation of it, her muscle memory trying to connect her fingers to her face. Her hand came up off her lap again, but it only got as far as her stomach. The effort was too much. Instead, she had to sit there, staring at me, as more tears escaped from her eyes and the saliva bubbled at the corner of her lips.

  ‘I was hoping to maybe speak to your husband,’ I said to her gently, ‘but if he’s at work, I can find him there.’ I shuffled forward on the sofa, uncomfortable at the idea of her husband lying to her, and troubled by having to pump her for information. ‘I was also hoping to speak to Jack Kilburn.’

  It was hard to tell if she’d even heard me.

  ‘Mrs Presley? Do you know a man called Jack Kilburn?’

  She was looking down into her lap, but appeared to nod.

  ‘You know him?’

  Yes.

  ‘Do you know where he lives?’

  As soon as I asked the question, I thought: How the hell is she going to tell me even if she does? But then she slowly lifted her head and directed her eyes up, towards the mantelpiece. I followed her line of vision and, for the first time, saw some papers tucked behind one of the pictures of Richard, her and Bill Presley.

  Getting up, I lifted the papers out and saw that they were the minutes of a council meeting that Bill Presley had attended. They ran to six pages and there was nothing of any real interest – except for the last page. There, Kilburn – as chairman – had listed his details.

  It included his home address.

  I made a note of it, folded the papers back together and slipped them in behind the picture frame again. When I turned back to Carla Presley, the guilt snapped at me a second time: she was staring at me, silent, unmoved, tear tracks like ribbons against her face. There was more saliva, and I could tell now that it really bothered her; that she was embarrassed by it and frustrated she couldn’t wipe it away.

  ‘Is there something I can get for you?’ I asked her.

  She blinked. Yes.

  ‘Tissues? Something like that?’

  Yes.

  ‘Are they in here?’

  No.

  ‘Upstairs?’

  No.

  ‘In the kitchen?’

  Yes.

  ‘They’re in the kitchen?’

  Yes.

  ‘Okay, just bear with me.’

  I got up, headed into the hallway and took a left towards the kitchen. On the wall beneath the staircase there were more photos of the three of them, the pictures packed into a thin, black iron frame, shaped like a tree. I paused briefly, looking at shots of Richard Presley, of Carla before she suffered her stroke, and of Bill, hugging Richard while in uniform.

  The kitchen was small and old-fashioned, a table pushed up against one wall, dishes piled up in the sink, the microwave showing evidence of past meals. It seemed to paint a picture of a man struggling to cope, not just with his own conscience or with his job, but with the rigours of looking after an incapacitated wife.

  I couldn’t see the tissues anywhere obvious and, as I started going through the drawers, I saw another door, half hidden in the corner of the room. I assumed it was a pantry or a utility room, but when I opened it up, I was wrong.

  It was Bill Presley’s office.

  61

  A steel cabinet had been left partially open. There was a laptop on the desk and a mess of paperwork, and books had been piled up on the floor at the far side of the room. There was no bookcase to hold them, no real furniture of any kind except for the cabinet, the desk, and an unmade sofa bed in the corner, its cushions sunken and worn. There was a crumpled blanket on the sofa and an empty bottle of whisky on the edge of the desk. Presley had slept here last night.

  I looked at the bottle again.

  Maybe he slept here every night.

  I quietly pulled out the drawers of the cabinet. They contained police files; work he must have brought home with him. At a glance, they were uninteresting: minor disputes over property boundaries, petty burglary; scuffles and fights outside the only pub in town; punch-ups after affairs had been outed; men and women, though mostly men, found collapsed and unconscious in the middle of the high street at one in the morning. For the majority, drunkenness appeared to be a by-product of living in a place where there were no cafés, no restaurants, no cinemas, one pub, few shops, and no decent Internet connection or TV stations. But I didn’t imagine that was why Bill Presley got drunk. I glanced at the sofa and the whisky bottle again.

  I imagined he got drunk for other reasons.

  Looking at the laptop, I considered switching it on, but I’d been gone a minute already and was conscious of raising alarms with Carla, so I returned to the living room instead. I told her I hadn’t been able to find tissues, and asked if she wanted me to look upstairs. She nodded.

  I headed up.

  There were two bedrooms. By the looks of things, Richard’s had been left pretty much exactly as it was the day he took the ship out of Blake Point with Beth. His shelves were full of machine parts, things he’d half fixed, model boats he’d built, an archaic mid-2000s PC with a tower on the floor, and tons of books. There were encyclopaedias, reference texts, novels, and I realized half the books in Bill Presley’s office weren’t actually his, but Richard’s. It reinforced everything I’d seen of him myself back in the UK.

  I took a quick look at the bedroom belonging to Bill and Carla, saw that only one side of the bed had been slept in, then crept downstairs again. I moved silently along the hall, out of sight of the living room, and returned to the office.

  Sliding in at the desk, I tried the laptop.

  It hummed faintly into life, making the Windows Vista start-up sound. As I waited, I started going through the drawers of the desk. In the third one down, I found something: a red card folder, buried under some notepads.

  On the computer screen, a password prompt flashed up, so I switched the laptop off, pushed it aside and laid the folder down on the desk. The corners of something were already escaping from inside.

  Newspaper cuttings.

  Except they weren’t cuttings of stories, but cuttings of headlines, all taken from the Empress Express. One was a front page – I could still see part of the masthead – but most appeared to be articles confined to the interior. On the back of each one, in biro, Presley had written the date on it.

  I put them in chronological order.

  The first was from April 1992.

  DOG FINDS LEG BONE ON STRATHYDE HIKING TRAIL

  The next was from a few months later, in June, and featured a picture. It was fuzzy, smudged from being kept in the folder, and discoloured.

  STRATHYDE FENCE REINFORCED

  Tests confirm leg bone doesn’t belong to missing Sophia resident Caleb Beck.

  The accompanying picture was of three men, each wearing mud-and oil-stained clothes. On two of them I could make out knives, in sheaths, at their belts, but a lot of other detail had become lost because of ink smears. A caption read:

  The fence was reinforced by its original construction team. Left to right: Bill Presley, Jack Kilburn, Anthony Jessop.

  I leaned in closer to the picture.

  If I hadn’t already seen Presley in the shots dotted around his living room, and from the pictur
e of him in uniform I’d found on the web, I’d have struggled even to recognize him. He still had a full head of hair back then, and a moustache which wrapped around his lip and followed parallel lines to his chin.

  I turned to the other two.

  With nothing on which to base my knowledge of them, they were just a vague black and white blur. I could tell they were both big – tall and brawny – and that they had light hair and beards, but those things might not even be relevant now. They’d still be tall – but they might be fat, bald and clean-shaven.

  The last cutting was from November 1997, ten years after the disappearance of Caleb Beck.

  BUENOS AIRES POLICE ASK FOR HELP AS COLD CASE TEAM SEARCH FOR MISSING WOMAN

  Selina Torres. It had to be.

  Going to my phone, I brought up the browser, headed to Google Argentina and put in a fresh search for Torres, this time adding Buenos Aires and policía tags.

  Finally, I got something.

  The story was too old to have been digitized in its entirety on the web, but I found a scan of a half-page from La Nación, an Argentine newspaper, uploaded to a list feature about weird disappearances. Underneath, there was a summary of the story but my Spanish was rudimentary at best, so I copied and pasted it into a translation program. The results weren’t perfect, but they were good enough to understand.

  SELINA TORRES

  Argentine stewardess Torres was last seen at the Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires in July 1987. Her credit card showed coffee that she bought and a bottle of perfume, but detectives could not at the time find out for themselves which airline she worked and, in fact, began to suspect that she did not work for an airline at all, even though it was a story that she told her family. Airport cameras showed her walking to a gate with flights to Empress Islands, but immigration record and surveillance footage indicate she never made it there. On the tenth anniversary of her disappearance, a team of cold cases of the Metropolitan Police of Buenos Aires joined the Royal Police of the Empress Islands to try to discover what happened to Torres, but found never a trace of her.