I Am Missing: David Raker Missing Persons #8

by Tim Weaver

  But it came together now.

  They’d been crosses, hidden beneath the level of the grass. I could picture them clearly, as if I was operating on a delay: each one was two pale lengths of plywood nailed together. As the wind picked up, they’d bent in the breeze, making them harder to identify, but they’d been there. Graves. Presley had had earth matted to his trousers because he’d marked them out for me to find.

  Worse, there had been many more than two.

  I looked at Dell. ‘How many?’

  ‘How many what?’

  ‘How many people did you bury out the back?’

  He came forward, jabbing the crossbow at me, reminding me of who was in charge. I rocked back on my heels, hitting the wall hard, and dust showered me. I felt it touch my face, saw it land on my shoulders, but I didn’t move. He had the crossbow poised only a couple of feet from the tip of my nose.

  ‘They’re gone,’ he said.

  ‘Not to their families they’re not.’

  He watched me for a moment. ‘Much as I got on with Bill,’ he said, ‘with Jack, with Anthony, I wasn’t about to make do with their sloppy seconds.’

  I felt a moment of confusion again – but then I got it.

  ‘Torres wasn’t the only woman you flew over.’

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘How many others?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You’re a liar. How many?’

  Dell shrugged. ‘Enough for all of us.’

  ‘What the hell did you do up here?’

  ‘Like I told you,’ he said, ‘this place is a card trick.’

  The card trick was the Brink.

  It was him I’d seen out there, a shape in the mist. He’d been toying with me, but that was all it had taken. The noise from the horn, the glimpse of his silhouette, it had been enough to knock me off balance, to make me question myself, so it would have been more than enough for three terrified kids. It would have been enough to sow the seed of doubt in town too: a fiction, a myth, that grew with the construction of the fence, with the whispers that it might not just be landmines up here, with the nights three kids spent tied to the fence as punishment and the details they must have let slip about it afterwards. And when the dog brought Selina Torres’s leg bone back, that hadn’t been part of the plan, but, ironically, it may actually have aided the lie. It was a story controlled by the most powerful men in town; a story created by them, and then disseminated in a place where rumours couldn’t just disappear.

  ‘That’s the thing with stories,’ he said, almost as if he knew what I’d been thinking. ‘All of them, even the fictional ones, have to be built on an element of truth. And most people, they only believe what they can see with their own eyes.’ He took a step back, a twitch of a smile at his mouth again; but he wasn’t amused this time, he was triumphant. ‘You arrived here as a non-believer, didn’t you? You were shouting down the idea of something being out here. But on that mountain, just for a moment, you had your belief shaken. And that’s all it takes. In a place like this, full of insular people with simple ideas, you only need a glimpse. And the little fuckers – Richard, and Penny, and Beth – who came up here snooping around, well, we had to take it a stage further with them. They broke the rules. I admired their courage in a way, but we couldn’t let it slide. I mean, Jack had had his suspicions that his girls were creeping out after dark for a while, so he and Bill followed them up there one night. That was who the girls saw at the fence. Jack was the “monster” they glimpsed as they ran for their lives. Jessop was who they heard out in the Brink the night they were left there. We tied them up so they could see and hear just enough for the story to grow, and then we gave the rumours a little push in the town when we needed to. And do you know how many other kids thought it might be a good idea to come up here after Richard got over the fence?’

  ‘None.’

  He nodded. ‘None.’

  ‘And you invented the story to cover up what happened here?’

  ‘We did what was necessary.’

  ‘To cover up the truth about all the people you shot?’

  ‘We did what was necessary,’ he said again.

  ‘Beck turned up here, angry and wanting to know why people were on his property, and somehow it all got out of hand. Somehow it all went crazy and y–’

  ‘Sssshhh.’ He held a finger up to me, his other hand still gripping the crossbow.

  Wind whispered past us, seeking out the spaces of the house, and like a sound caught in a loop the back door slammed against its frame, once, twice, three times. In the silence, I looked from Dell to the front of the house, then to the back room, trying to work out if this was another trick he was playing; another story dreamed up to unsettle me. But there was no playfulness in him this time.

  He looked nervous.

  A second later, I realized why: there was another noise, hidden behind the exhalation of the wind, behind the snap of the door. He’d heard it first because he was so familiar with the cabin: its tones, vibrations, the way it breathed and felt.

  Now I heard it too.

  It was someone softly calling my name.

  76

  It was coming from the back of the cabin.

  Dell moved around me, so that he was between me and the front door, and then gestured with the crossbow that I should go ahead of him. I did as he asked, conscious that he was nervous now, alarmed, his finger readjusting on the bow. I only needed him to lose concentration for a second and he might accidentally press the trigger too hard.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he whispered as he followed me.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Are you messing with me, Raker?’

  I shook my head again.

  I wasn’t sure if he believed me or not, but I used the moment to my advantage, as I passed from one area of the cabin to the next, to take in the room, to see if anything had changed. My eyes traced the bullet holes, the petals on the floor.

  Nothing looked different.

  The rear door wafted open and slammed shut again, and then he prodded me in the back with the crossbow, the hard plastic of the arrow track sniping at my spine. I headed for the door, again letting my eyes do the work. I took in the sofa and the chairs and the stove and imagined what it had been like in 1987; how it had been the night Dell, Kilburn, Presley and Jessop had come here. I thought of the women Dell had flown over, paid for, employing their services because, presumably like Selina Torres, they were discreet. I didn’t know what any of them looked like, what their names were, but I knew they’d never been cabin crew, they’d never had desk jobs, they weren’t jetting off to far-flung places to attend meetings, even though that was what they’d told their families back in Buenos Aires. Even three decades on, their families still believed the stories. All they knew of their daughters, sisters, wives, girlfriends was that they left home in July 1987 and never came back.

  So many missing people.

  ‘Stop,’ Dell hissed at me, and then shoved me aside, to the right of the rear door. I stumbled, hitting one of the chairs, and by the time I’d recovered and looked back at him, he was pulling open the door, the crossbow still aimed at me.

  I watched his eyes scan the veranda.

  It was so quiet now, I could see that he was thinking exactly the same as me. Had we actually heard anything at all? Was it really my name that had been called? Who would have been calling my name? He glanced at me, beckoned me over, not trusting me to stay where I was. Once I was close to him, he retreated from the door and shoved me out on to the veranda.

  It was cold, getting dark.

  This time I could feel the wind. It rushed through the grass, swiping at it, cresting it – and in the gaps that were created I finally saw everything properly.

  The crosses.

  They whipped back and forth in the breeze, drifting in and out of view like spirits passing through walls. In among the grass, I counted two. Three. Four.

  Five.

  Six.

/>   I stood there, stunned.

  ‘You killed six people?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ he said, shoving me forward with the palm of his hand, so that I stood at the top of the veranda steps, looking at all the crosses.

  It hadn’t been a murder.

  It had been a massacre.

  ‘You killed six people,’ I muttered, almost to myself, the words so sour on my tongue, so surreal, I could hardly process them.

  ‘I said shut up.’

  He looked stressed, the blue of his eyes subdued in the light, their lustre lost, his fingers seared red from the cold and from holding the crossbow so hard.

  I followed his gaze, out on to the hillside.

  Now I was closer to it, I could see patches where the grass grew higher, more rampantly, elongated squares that seemed to have been specifically watered. But they hadn’t. It was what was underneath the soil, long since decayed, that made them grow like that. They were exactly where Presley had placed the crosses.

  The wind came again, blowing snow across us, and when the grass moved in time, in a sweeping arc, I thought I saw something shift further up the hillside.

  Dell saw it too.

  He tightened his grip on the crossbow, forced the stock in harder against his shoulder, and moved to the very edge of the veranda. I watched him, his gaze scanning the slope, panic in his eyes. He shouted, ‘I can see you up there!’ but his lie was carried away by the wind.

  He glanced at me and then back to the hillside.

  ‘Is this something to do with you, Raker? Is it?’

  He sounded desperate, frightened, for the first time.

  ‘I said, is this something to do with you?’ he screamed again, and swivelled the crossbow around to face me. It was juddering against his arm, the anger and panic sending ripples through his body. ‘What the hell is out there? Huh?’

  I held up both hands. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re lying to me.’

  I took a step further back. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You’re lying!’

  ‘I don’t know what it is,’ I said to him, ‘I swear to you I don’t,’ and I turned to study the hillside again, the grass, the flecks of snow, the plywood crosses, the whites of the petals as they fluttered and spread.

  ‘Come out!’ Dell screamed at the hillside.

  The wind settled.

  ‘Come out!’ he said again, then again, shouting so hard his voice began to break up. He turned the crossbow and took a big step towards me. ‘I’ll kill him!’

  He took another.

  ‘I’ll put an arrow through his head!’

  He was three feet from me, maybe even less. I waited, hands in the air, trying to show him I wasn’t a threat, that the danger was coming from the hillside, from whatever was hidden out in the grass. It seemed to pass from me to him, my lack of threat, reassurance that I wasn’t about to try anything, because he swung the crossbow back around, directing it out at the shadows, and – his voice hoarse – started shouting into the wind again.

  ‘I’ll come up there and kill you!’

  He went back to the edge of the veranda.

  ‘I’ll fucking kill you!’

  He scanned the hillside, looking along the arrow track, swinging the weapon from left to right. And then he placed his foot down on to the first step.

  The wood instantly snapped under his weight, so rotten, so sodden, it just collapsed beneath him. He lurched forward, trying to grip the crossbow at the same time as trying to prevent himself from toppling over.

  Sensing my chance, I threw myself at him.

  He didn’t have time to react. I smashed into him with as much power as I could muster, putting everything behind it. His foot was ripped out of the hole he’d created and both of us crashed through the banisters on the steps.

  The ping of an arrow releasing.

  We hit the long grass of the hillside hard, me on top of him. I landed with my knees bunched at his ribs, and felt something snap inside his skin: bones breaking and bending; muscles twisting. He yelled out, his voice lost in the rush of air exploding from him, his saliva flecking against my skin. But I ignored it and scrambled to my feet. Looking for his crossbow, I spotted it three or four feet away.

  I went for it, scooped it up, yanked another arrow out of its housing and loaded it into the weapon. It took me longer than I wanted it to, but any worries I had about him coming at me were soon dispelled: he remained on his back, face creased up, holding his ribs.

  He tried to speak, but the noise was like a wheeze from an old engine. His ribs were broken. He looked at me, blinked. He knew it was over.

  I took in the hillside.

  I couldn’t see anything out there, not from the angle I was at. Against the ashen haze of early evening, it was just flecks of snow and acres of grass, lying across the hillside like a carpet. Off to my right, smudged behind mist, I could see the outline of Strathyde, the peak itself, hundreds of feet further into the sky.

  ‘Hello?’ I said.

  My voice sounded small in the wind, in the whisper of the grass as it went from left to right, a dance I’d seen over and over since I’d been here. I glanced at Dell, still in the same position clutching his ribs, and then back out at the hillside.

  Now someone was standing about twenty feet up the slope.

  They were in a coat, cocooned by its blackness. The hood was up, but I could see strands of brown hair, the hint of pale skin. As they came forward, passing through the grass, I realized it was a woman, could see it from her shape, the way she moved. She was wearing grey weatherproof trousers and dark fur-lined boots, wet and scarred.

  She moved between the graves, her head down, watching where her feet went, careful not to stand on the resting place of these victims; of five women and one man who never returned home.

  Finally, she came to a stop.

  ‘I know my husband’s dead.’

  She’d thrown back the hood of her coat.

  ‘So now I want to know the truth about Richard,’ she said softly. ‘All of it.’

  Her words were eloquent and exact, no hint of a slur, no impediment, just as there was no hint of infirmity to her body. She hadn’t been paralysed by a stroke.

  She’d just made the world believe she had.

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  Carla Presley came further forward. She stopped again a few feet from me, the hillside moving around her. Inside the coat, her face was a perfect oval. I could see a hint of a slope to her mouth – minor, negligible – confirmation that she hadn’t lied about having a stroke.

  But it hadn’t confined her to a chair.

  ‘It happened two years ago,’ she said, referring to the stroke, ‘before Richard left. For the year before he disappeared, I couldn’t communicate with him. I just had to watch him. He lived out on the edge of town, and he’d come home to us, to see how I was, and he’d stay with me while Bill was out working, or getting drunk at the pub, and he’d talk to me, or he’d read to me.’ A flicker of a smile. ‘I’m his mum, so I know I’m biased, but I was always so proud of him. I still am proud of him, of course. He was so gentle.’

  It was an echo of what Bill Presley had said.

  He had the most beautiful soul.

  ‘I had absolutely no idea where Richard went,’ she said.

  I remembered her reaction back at the house when I told her that her son was alive and living in the UK; the shock when I revealed he had no memory. It was why I felt like I could trust her: you couldn’t fake that reaction, even if you could fake the rest of it.

  ‘I had absolutely no idea,’ she said again, quieter now. ‘And I had no idea that Bill was lying to me either. I couldn’t have imagined that he might know the truth about where Rich went and why. He loved that boy like I did. Bill could be difficult, selfish. He was an alcoholic. He’d fly off the handle about nothing and be simmering for days. He slapped me once and spent the weeks after apologizing, over and over, getting down on bended knee asking for forgiveness; and whe
n I didn’t forgive him, he flew off the handle again and stormed out. That was who he was. He was a man who it became impossible to love. But the one thing that never wavered, even for a second, was how he felt about Rich. So the thought that he might know something, it didn’t cross my mind.’

  She stopped, swallowed, and I saw the echoes of the stroke once again.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘My speech has mostly recovered, but sometimes words catch and I struggle to say things the way I want.’

  ‘Would you rather sit down inside?’

  She nodded.

  In the cabin, I found a chair for her and then returned to check on Dell. He looked up at me as I approached, eyes streaming, hand still pressed to his ribs. I dragged him to the steps of the cabin. He cried out as we moved, the sound wet in his throat, the grass flattening and rising again as his body snaked across it.

  When we got to the steps, I set him down.

  He wasn’t going anywhere.

  I headed up the steps again, into the back room, within sight of Dell. Even if he was capable of making a move, I could see him, and I’d be on him in seconds. I sat opposite Carla, in the gathering shadow of the mountain.

  ‘Why pretend that you never recovered?’

  Her lips flattened into a kind of grimace. ‘At the time Richard disappeared, I could feel myself getting stronger. Well, physically stronger. Emotionally, I was a wreck. I was so panicked for Rich, so scared he might come to harm. When search parties didn’t find him or Beth anywhere on the islands, I couldn’t work out why they would even want to leave. It didn’t make sense to me. But because I couldn’t move very easily, because I was still having problems with my speech, I just had to sit there and watch. I watched Bill come home every night. I heard him out on the phone in his office, talking in whispers. I realized that, although I was improving, Bill hadn’t even noticed. He was so consumed. In his head, I was exactly the same as I’d been since the day of the stroke. He still treated me in the same way. He talked at me, not to me; he carried me around, assuming I couldn’t walk, couldn’t do anything for myself at all. But the weirdest thing was, he never spoke about Rich. Our boy disappeared – and all Bill ever said about him was that there was no news.’