I Am Missing: David Raker Missing Persons #8

by Tim Weaver

  ‘He didn’t seem upset?’

  ‘Not upset enough. He didn’t react how he should have reacted. If there was no news, if he genuinely didn’t know where Rich was, he should have been in pieces. But instead he was so controlled. “There’s no news, but we’ll find him. There’s no news, but we’ll find him.” He just learned the words by rote. That was why I began to get suspicious.’

  The cabin moaned again in the wind.

  ‘So I kept my recovery from him,’ she said, looking down into her hands. Her hood shifted against the back of her head, and some of her hair escaped, twisted coils of brown, weaved with threads of silver-grey. ‘I didn’t want a carer, I didn’t want to be looked in on, so I showed him enough improvement that he wouldn’t be afraid of leaving me alone during the day, and I just sat there and watched. I watched him, listened. I let him install emergency buttons and rails in the bathroom, the stairlift. I let him do all of that so he wouldn’t be home during the day and, when he disappeared to his office in the evenings to make calls, I knew that he’d never consider that I might be listening. I mean, he didn’t think I could walk unaided.’

  ‘What did you find out?’

  She looked up at me. There was a flash of guilt in her face, a concession that she’d lied, cheated and tricked her husband and now there was never going to be a chance to say sorry. But then her expression solidified, as if she realized he’d done exactly the same to her, more than her, worse than anything she’d ever done to him, and she said, ‘I went through his office. I searched it top to bottom. I found those newspaper cuttings. He’d buried them deep in a drawer and I couldn’t figure out why. I wanted to find out more, but our Internet connection had stopped working and it wasn’t like I could head outside and walk down to the library. I mean, I could. By then, I could easily do that. But I would have given myself away.’

  She wiped the corner of her mouth. There was no saliva there – not in the same way as there had been earlier, at her house – but she’d become used to doing it, the routine of it, and now she did it automatically.

  ‘But you know something?’ she said. ‘Our Internet hadn’t stopped working – it had been switched off. I found a couple of statements in the office that showed Bill had cancelled it in January.’

  She stopped again and looked at me, and I saw all I needed to: in the time between me leaving her house and now, she’d worked out the reasons why her husband had cancelled their Internet. Because, in January, Richard had washed up on the shores of Southampton Water, and his case had been covered by the papers there. And however small the risk was of Carla guessing her son had gone to the UK and then her trawling every single local media outlet in Britain for any trace of him, it still represented a risk. By getting rid of the Internet at home, Bill Presley reduced that risk to zero.

  ‘No one else in Sophia knew about Richard?’

  ‘No. It never got reported here.’

  She halted, emotion rattling in her throat again. I wasn’t sure if it was the mention of Richard, the idea of him losing his memory, or the lies she’d been told by her husband.

  I glanced outside at Dell. He was just watching us; listening.

  ‘You said you overheard Bill talking in his office?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘For a long time, it was just snatches of things. Conversations with Jack Kilburn that didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I didn’t think any of them could be about Rich, not for a second; I thought Bill might be having an affair, or that he was in financial trouble. I even thought he might have some terminal disease and was too frightened to tell me. I kept listening to him, kept going back to his office when he was at work or out in the evening. I tried to get into his laptop, but it was locked. I went through his cabinets but it was just old cases.’

  She glanced at Dell, his arm against the steps, wheezing softly, and a look of disgust twisted her face. ‘Then I saw you coming towards my house again this afternoon,’ she said, ‘and I thought you were returning to ask me more questions. But you went right past, as if you were heading up into the hills; and ten, fifteen minutes after that, I saw him going the same way’ – she gestured to Dell – ‘only he was carrying a crossbow. I knew something wasn’t right.’

  Her eyes switched to the hillside.

  ‘These hills,’ she went on. ‘We’ve heard so much about them. Everyone was so scared of what lay beyond the fence. Everyone understood that it was off-limits, even grown adults like me. If we didn’t believe the stories about some monster, we believed there were landmines. Whatever was up here, we knew enough to keep away.’ She stopped, her gaze returning to me. ‘But look at what’s up here. Just more lies.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Bill did something terrible,’ Carla said.

  I nodded. There were no words to comfort her, nothing to sugar-coat the truth about what her husband, Kilburn, Jessop and Dell had done here in 1987.

  ‘I knew Bill was involved in something bad. Eventually, I just knew it.’ She wiped her mouth again, stopping for a second. ‘And then I knew it for sure about a week ago, because I heard him on the phone again.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘Saying a name. Raker,’ she said. ‘I heard the name Raker.’

  ‘You knew I was coming?’

  ‘When I heard him talk about you, what you did for a living, I hoped you were.’

  She looked across at Dell, his skin a pale moon against the half-light of the early evening, and then started trying to find something in the pocket of her coat. A moment later, she brought it out: a piece of A4 paper, folded into quarters.

  ‘Here,’ she said, holding it out to me.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Bill was gone before I got up this morning.’

  I took the piece of paper from her and opened it up. It was a map, hand-drawn in felt-tip pen, of the Brink, the approach to the tarn, the lake, the cabin.

  ‘He left that for me by the side of my bed.’

  Below the map, he’d drawn a top-down illustration of the cabin, the rooms all marked off, the front and back verandas drawn on, the hillside out the back represented as six coffins. Beside most of the coffins he’d written names; beside a couple he hadn’t written any name at all. Those were just Female 20–30. I didn’t know if Presley couldn’t remember the women’s names, or if he’d never known them in the first place, and I wasn’t sure which of the two was worse. But then my eyes were drawn to something else.

  An X was marked over one of the rooms.

  ‘Follow me,’ I said to Carla, and led her out back.

  The cold hit us like a wall, fierce and brutal. I looked down at Dell – his teeth chattering, his skin pale – then out to the graves on the hillside, some of the crosses bent over permanently by the wind. Then I felt around in my pocket for the key that Presley had given me at the lido. I thought it had been for the cabin; for the front or the back door. But it wasn’t.

  I looked along the slats of the veranda to the door at the end.

  The key was for the one room I hadn’t been into.

  78

  The door inched open.

  Inside, a single bed was pushed up against one wall with a faded, threadbare mattress on top and a length of rope knotted around one of the bedposts. My gaze lingered on the rope, and then I looked across at the opposite wall, maybe only four feet away from the edge of the bed, where there was a chest of drawers. I stepped further in, the smell of mould in the air, and slid out the drawers, one after another. All of them were empty.

  The only other piece of furniture was a TV/VCR combo unit, perched in the corner of the room on a side table and coated in a layer of dust. There was no mains electricity in the cabin, so the unit was attached to an oil-powered generator. It sat beneath the table, covered so thickly in cobwebs it was almost impossible to see it.

  I glanced over my shoulder at Carla. She was standing in the doorway, the map still clutched in her hand. Her ey
es flashed as she glanced from the television to the bed, to the rope, then to the chest of drawers.

  To what was on top of the drawers.

  An audio cassette player and a cassette.

  I picked up the cassette, saw from the spools that it was about two-thirds used, and popped the lid on the player. Glancing at Carla again, wondering what we were going to find on the tape and whether she should listen to it, I slid it in, pushed the lid down again and gently pressed the Play button.

  ‘… out of hand. Just totally out of hand.’

  It was Bill Presley.

  He was quiet, the silence filled with the crackle of the tape, the sound of the wind, the creak of the floorboards as Carla took an instinctive step closer to me, drawn by her husband’s words. I quickly realized what this was: an account of that night in 1987. How so many bullets ended up in the walls. How so many people ended up in graves on a hill. I’d been wrong earlier: I’d seen the flowers and the crosses as the last act of a guilty man’s life. But that wasn’t quite the last act.

  ‘Caleb Beck turned up here,’ Presley said. I heard tears in his voice; the echoes of thirty years of secrets and remorse. His words were slurred too. ‘He went fucking berserk. He’d been out looking at the stars and he saw us, or heard us, and he came storming up here and through the front door.’ I heard Presley swallow, go to speak, then swallow again. ‘I can hear Beck, even now. His voice; what he was screaming. “What’s going on here? What the hell do you all think you’re doing? This is my property.” He was right. It was his, and we’d destroyed the place. Desecrated it. Booze, poker chips, smashed glass, empty bottles, puke. All the women. There was piles of weed just lying in packets on the tables. Most of us were half-drunk or stoned.’

  As he faded out, I looked at Carla.

  She was wiping her eyes.

  Presley began again: ‘Roland was in one of the bedrooms with Torres. We didn’t actually know most of the women’s names, but we knew hers. When Beck came into the cabin, Roland heard him and came running out of the bedroom. He barely had his bloody trousers on.’ Presley made a sound in his throat, a kind of it would have been funny on any other night. ‘Beck immediately goes for the jugular. He sees Roland and he zeroes in on him, because he knows Roland is the ringleader, because that’s the type of person Roland is, and he says, “Your dad is going to hear about this. This is disgraceful. This is unacceptable.” ’

  Presley stopped and, on the tape, there was the distinctive pop of a cork. The glug of liquid filling a tumbler. The ching of a bottle being placed back down.

  ‘Roland wasn’t scared of many things,’ Presley said, the words softened by the booze, ‘but he was scared of his dad. Not physically scared of him, but scared of upsetting him. Him and his old man, they were like peas in a pod. They were the same, but they had this weird relationship – it was cold and stand-offish, and Roland was always slagging him off, telling us that his dad was useless, in tons of debt, a disaster, stupid, an idiot, a failure, all this sort of thing. Yet Roland constantly sought his dad’s approval, right up until the old man died in ’92. So when Beck said he would tell Old Man Dell what had gone on at the cabin, he was pushing all the right buttons. He knew that, of all the things he could threaten Roland with – and there wasn’t much that could get to Roland – that was the one. Of course, what Beck didn’t know was that Roland had fucked up on an even bigger scale: he’d discovered his old man’s contact book and had been through it, he’d found Selina Torres in it and persuaded her and four of her friends to fly across; he’d promised to pay their flights, their expenses and give them two grand each. And worse than all of that was that he’d taken the entire amount from his dad’s safe – basically, the last of Old Man Dell’s money.’

  Presley quietened; the calm before the storm.

  ‘It all happened so fast,’ he said. I heard him take a drink, and then another. He cleared his throat, the tape crackling in the gaps between words. ‘Roland pulled out this gun. I don’t know where the hell he got it, because Roland was no marksman, but suddenly he had it. I don’t think Beck thought he would fire it, I don’t think any of us did, but you could feel this ripple go across the room. The air seemed to change. Roland pointed it at Beck.’

  I looked at Carla; she looked back.

  ‘Beck tried to grab it from him.’

  I turned to the tape.

  ‘And the gun went off in Beck’s face.’

  As Presley spoke, his voice wobbled, breaking apart, as if he still couldn’t believe what he was saying, couldn’t recognize the image burned on to the back of his eyes. On the tape, I heard him move, and when he spoke again he was closer to the recorder, his voice distorted, not just by the distance between him and the device, but by what he was having to describe.

  ‘There was screaming,’ he said, his voice so small now, it was like it was coming from somewhere outside the cabin. ‘There was screaming and furniture got knocked over, and the booze and the drugs went everywhere. The women went crazy and started retreating into the corners of the room. I did too. I’m not too proud to admit it.’ Another drink. ‘And then one of the women – I think her name was Calista – she grabbed her clothes off the sofa and made a break for the back of the cabin. At this point, Roland’s in a state of shock. I just remember him looking down at the gun, holding it like he didn’t recognize it or know how to use it. Beck was dead at his feet and there was blood everywhere.’

  The tape whirred, hissed.

  ‘So Jack and Anthony, they went for their guns too.’

  Another drink.

  ‘They were sons of farmers. That’s who we are here: farmers and hunters and fishermen. The banking, the tourism – that’s not who we are. We’re on the edge of the world with nothing around us but ocean and emptiness. It’s the last wilderness. We were hunters and farmers and fishermen before anything else.’

  Another drink.

  ‘Jack and Ant went for their guns, and as soon as this Calista yanks open the rear door of the cabin – bang – Jack puts one in her back. I don’t know what he was thinking; maybe that, if one got away, everything would go to shit for us. Or maybe he wasn’t thinking, maybe that was the whole problem, but she died there on the veranda, bleeding through the slats. The others scattered.’

  Another drink. Another.

  ‘Bang bang, Ant does the second and the third. Bang bang bang, Roland does for Torres as she comes out of the bedroom. He’s putting bullets all over the walls because he’s such a terrible fucking shot, but by then, him and Jack are so pumped up on adrenalin, it barely even matters. They turn to me, because the last of the women is sitting next to me, crying so hard she can barely breathe. It’s like I can feel her heart coming through her chest, even though I must be a foot away from her. Jack starts to come over, and she can see what’s coming, and she grabs my arm and starts to beg for her life in Spanish, and I … I just … I …’

  There was no sound of him taking a drink this time, only the noise of him sobbing. When I turned to Carla, she was crying too, staring at the tape in silence. In the spaces behind her, I could see just the vague hint of the hillside, the night setting in. I thought about Dell, about having left him alone out there, but even if he’d somehow made a break for it, it wouldn’t really matter. He’d shattered his ribs. He could barely stand or breathe. He wasn’t going to get far from this graveyard.

  The end was coming for him.

  ‘I watched the light go out in her eyes,’ Presley said, harder to understand now. ‘They shot her there while she was still looking at me, while she was still begging for her life. I had her blood all over me, bits of her brain on my face, and that was bad enough. But it’s her eyes. I wake up and see them. I go to sleep and see them. It’ll be thirty years next year, and it never stops, and do you know what hurts the most?’ Finally, we could hear him take another drink, swallowing hard. ‘One of them was Selina. One of them was called Calista. But I couldn’t even tell you what this one’s name was. I never found out
.’

  I stepped closer to the tape as Presley drifted into silence again, the cabin moaning like it had been exorcized of the memories that had tormented it.

  ‘But all of that,’ Presley said eventually, crippled by his burden, deformed by it, ‘all of that wasn’t even the worst thing I did. I helped bury Beck and those women on that slope. I went with the other three down to Beck’s farmhouse the next day to make sure there was nothing to connect us to his disappearance. I stood by and said nothing when Roland discovered holdalls full of money – literally, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds – hidden under Beck’s floorboards. And I stood by and said nothing, thirteen years later, when I got my share of it. I said nothing. I said nothing while Jack moved in on Fiona, a woman who never knew about the cash we’d stolen from her husband – from her – and had no idea what had happened to Beck. I helped sow the seeds of rumour about the Brink. I helped create the insanity that exists in this town. But all of that isn’t why I’m going to burn in hell …’

  I waited, frozen to the spot.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Carla.’

  It wasn’t what I’d expected from him. I glanced at her, her tears like a road map on her face, her frown in a deep V, and she looked back at me – confused – and said, ‘What? What does he mean? What does he mean by “I’m so sorry, C–” ’

  ‘You went out at the last minute. Your sister was sick, so you stayed with her for the night in St George.’

  Presley again.

  ‘I didn’t know what else to do.’

  I could feel panic starting to grip me.

  ‘I tied him up.’

  Presley took another drink.

  ‘That was the worst thing I ever did.’