by Tim Weaver
He started sobbing again.
As the tape rolled on, the room filled with the sound of Bill Presley crying, and my eyes pinged from Carla to the bed, to the rope knotted around the bedpost.
I tied him up.
I looked at the TV-VCR unit. It was a Sharp, built in 1985 and shipped over from the UK according to a sticker on its flank. Bending down at the generator, I brushed the cobwebs away, tiny insects fleeing the invasion, and then switched it on. It chugged, spat, and seemed like it was about to die again. But then, slowly, steadily, it began to find a rhythm and the TV unit switched itself on.
I pressed the Eject button on the VCR and, with a clunk, the slot spat out a VHS tape. On the end of the tape, facing out, was a printed label. It said: winter special – july 1987. The tape was almost thirty years old. The unit was even older. They’d both been here the night six people were killed in the room next door.
No, I thought. No, not this.
I pushed the tape back into the player.
In the corner of the screen, a small videotape icon flashed. I glanced at Carla who had come further in, the temperature so cold now, our breath was gathering in front of our faces, even inside. Within a couple of seconds, the audio cassette tape had clicked off, Presley’s sobs lost for ever, and a picture had sprung into life on the combo unit.
Kids’ Hour started.
I watched the familiar TV mast intro, the one Richard had remembered so well even as Naomi Russum tried to chip away at his recollection of it. I felt Carla move closer as the intro finished and a presenter appeared on-screen. The sound was poor, choppy, but I could hear enough: the presenter was saying that this was a special episode of the programme; that they were going to show a one-off thirty-minute drama, set on the Empress Islands.
No. No, don’t let it be this.
The opening credits of the drama started rolling.
Please don’t let it be this.
I’d never seen the film before but, as soon as the credits were finished and the first scene faded in, I began to feel nauseous. On-screen, a boy of eight or nine was walking through a kitchen. He stopped to pick a banana out of a fruit bowl on the table and then the picture crunched again, warped, reshaped.
As I watched, I remembered again what Presley had said to me at the lido: I read online that he can remember looking out at a beach as a kid. I read that they think it might have been where he grew up. It isn’t. He didn’t grow up by the beach.
Just tell him I’m sorry.
By the time I refocused my attention on the TV, the picture had settled again and the boy was heading towards the kitchen window. He stopped in front of it and looked out, peeling the banana. As I watched, I remembered something: Richard telling me how bananas were one of his connectors; how he’d instinctively known he would love them even before he’d ever had the chance to taste one.
On-screen, the camera moved in behind the boy, taking in the dome of his head in silhouette and the view beyond him. There was a smooth bank of grass immediately in front of the house – and then a sweep of white beach and a bay.
It was Richard’s memory.
The window. The beach. The bay.
It wasn’t somewhere he’d grown up: it was a drama he’d watched, over and over and over again on that night in 1987. Because Carla had gone out at the last minute when her sister became sick, and Presley hadn’t known what else to do. He’d already committed to coming up to the cabin. He couldn’t back out.
So he’d brought the four-year-old Richard with him.
He’d locked him in here with this VCR.
And he’d tied him to the bed so he wouldn’t wander off.
79
The interviews took five days.
I sat in the poky confines of the converted sheep station on the slopes of Sophia and answered questions from some of the officers who’d worked under Bill Presley. Most were still in shock, unable to reconcile my descriptions of what had happened out at the cabin – on the edge of a tarn a lot of them had never been to, or even knew existed – with what they knew of the man they’d worked with.
It seemed to be broadly accepted that Presley liked a drink, but in a place where the bottom of a bottle was sometimes the only place to seek solace, it wasn’t viewed as any sort of crime by the locals, and certainly wasn’t an indication of a person’s morality. Presley had served the police force for thirty years, he was genial and sociable and he cared for a disabled wife, and, for the first few days, that bought him some goodwill. When his name came up, people – even the officers who knew what he’d done – would continue to speak highly of him. But that gradually began to change as detectives started arriving from the UK – at the request of the Empress Islands governor in St George – to lead an independent investigation.
All three UK detectives were from the Met, and all three of them sat in the same room as me and listened to my account of what had happened during the search for Richard Presley’s memories. I told them the truth, mostly, except about Marek’s death. When we got on to the subject of that, I said I had no idea where he was; that the last time I saw him was when Beth and I had locked him in the office on the ship. I was certain that the Met team knew about me, my history with the police back home, the unintentional enemies I’d made there through my cases, but they never brought it up and never tried to use it as a way to attack me. The only time we hit any resistance, any major discord, was when we got on to the subject of the Brink.
The people in the town closed up about it in the days after. No one would talk about what was out there, or they denied ever hearing any rumours, or they just frowned and sat there in silence. It was hard to tell whether it was out of embarrassment, anger at having been strung along for so many years, or whether – somewhere much deeper down – the stories had become so powerful and so ingrained that a part of them still believed them.
‘Did they honestly think there was some sort of monster out there?’ one of the female detectives asked me.
All three of them were the same. They sat there with half-smiles on their faces, unable to quite believe that so many in the community had been taken in by the idea, and it was easy to see it from their point of view now. They’d arrived at the end, when the truth was lying in graves on a snow-streaked hillside.
But I’d arrived in the days before that, and as much as I’d tried to deny it, I’d been out on that mountain in the mist and all it took was a glimpse of something strange to shake the foundations of my belief. Like Dell had said to me, it was a card trick. It was an illusion.
It didn’t have to be real, it just had to be real enough.
Between interviews, in my moments alone, at night when I’d stare up into the darkness of my tiny room at the bed and breakfast unable to sleep, I’d find it hard to think about anything except that bed in the room at the cabin. The VHS tape in the player. The rope. The four-year-old boy who was tied up, at his ankle or at his wrist, and made to watch the same programme over and over again while his father was in the next room. He must have heard the guns going off, the screams of the women as well. He must have heard the footsteps out on the veranda. But when Richard was back home, if he had chosen to say anything to his mum, to people who might listen, it would have been written off as confusion, as the wild imagination of a young boy.
On the tape, Bill Presley never talked about how Richard was in the days after, and Carla didn’t remember Richard ever mentioning anything to her about his father tying him up, or the sounds of gunshots and people shouting from the room next door. At four, he was probably too young to contextualize the sounds, even if being bound to a bed would have seemed odd and upsetting, regardless of how much his father had tried to comfort him about it. It wouldn’t have been the sort of thing that his dad usually did – every account I’d been given, even from Carla, was of a man who loved his son unconditionally – so it wouldn’t have been a surprise if Richard had mentioned something in the days afterwards.
But he hadn’t, or at leas
t no one could say otherwise. Anthony Jessop was long dead. Kilburn was in the morgue. Roland Dell might have remembered, and was perhaps the only person left who could, but when I asked the detectives if he ever mentioned anything about the four-year-old Richard in his interviews, they said he didn’t, that he only remembered Presley bringing the kid along. After that, the police had moved on again, to other things, their interrogation of Dell focusing on bigger issues: six bodies in the hillside behind the cabin; the theft of what turned out to be nearly nine hundred thousand pounds from Caleb Beck; and the murder of Penny Beck by Alexander Marek. They wanted to know about Naomi Russum as well, because it turned out she and Dell had been in a relationship in the early 2000s, and that she’d borrowed money from Dell – money he’d stolen from Beck – to help start her clinic. She’d been reluctant to deceive Richard, that much had always been obvious, but she’d chosen to go along with Dell’s lies all the same.
I understood why those things seemed bigger.
I understood how important they were.
Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about a four-year-old boy being tied to a bedpost; about the memory of a beach that had become everything to his future self; about the fact that he’d believed it had been the view from his family home.
He’d looked on it as an image to cherish, to build on, to make something of; a way to regain a life he so desperately wanted to remember and be part of again. But when it came down to it, the man who’d betrayed him the most – his father – had been the only one who’d called it correctly.
Maybe it was better that he didn’t remember.
And perhaps it was the exhaustion of the case, of following it so far into the rabbit hole that I’d ended up at the edge of the world, but when I lay awake in the darkness of that room thinking about that boy, I wanted to cry for him. I wanted to cry for Penny and Beth as well, who’d been tied to a fence in the dark.
Because we’d all been those children once.
And we’d all trusted the people who loved us.
80
When the Olympia dropped anchor at Buenos Aires four days after leaving the Empress Islands, Argentinian police officers and one of the Met detectives were waiting for it. They boarded the ship and found Beth Kilburn locked in an interview room, where she’d been kept for almost the entire journey across from the islands; and they found security staff that had been on the payroll of Roland Dell since Marek had come aboard looking for Beth back in January.
Beth returned to the islands, but only for the duration of the interviews. Her promise never to return had been broken, but not for long: a week after the interviews ended, she gathered her things together and flew to Cape Town. Thirty-six hours later, she landed in the UK.
I helped her out for a while, letting her crash in my spare room, and then she found a job in a local supermarket and moved into a shared house. At some point after that, she’d got in touch with Richard, but she told me their meeting had been weird, and difficult, and uncomfortable, and she wasn’t sure if they were going to see each other again. I felt sad at that, at the idea of a bond that – through no fault of their own – could never be properly repaired, and I felt even more upset as we sat and had coffee one day and Beth, totally out of nowhere, burst into tears and started telling me she missed Penny.
I gathered her hands in mine and said nothing, because anything I said would be worthless.
But then something changed.
On a bright day in December, I met Jacob Howson for a drink in a café close to the Red Tree School. We talked about his time lying low on the south coast, about how the school was under investigation, and how Roland Dell would never see daylight again, except from a prison yard. The whole time, Howson was quiet, worn down, suffering for the guilt he carried over Penny’s death and his choice to remain silent.
The police had interviewed him as Penny’s boyfriend and not charged him with anything, and he kept looking for reassurance that it was a good sign. But there was a haunted aspect to him, a kind of premonitory look to his eyes, that said he knew it was only a matter of time before they realized he’d withheld information.
Perhaps because of that, he told me he’d been going back over his house, dismantling furniture, looking inside books, under beds, in wardrobes, in a new attempt to see if he’d missed anything from Penny. It was guilt again, the lingering knowledge that he’d betrayed her: he wanted to feel like he was helping, and he wanted to believe that, somewhere, there was a message of forgiveness for him.
But it turned out the message wasn’t for him.
‘I found this,’ he said, handing me a folded piece of paper.
It was a handwritten letter, dated a week before Penny went missing, her writing rushed, untidy, words crossed out, some illegible. It was as if, at the time she wrote it, she knew something bad was coming. She’d got into the security suite at the Red Tree, she’d found the truth, and now the walls were closing in.
I read the letter with a heavy heart, knowing all that had followed it, and when I got to the end of it – like those moments when I lay awake in the dark of the bed and breakfast in Sophia – I found it hard to rein in my emotions.
‘Can I take this?’ I asked Howson.
‘Yes,’ he said, seeing it had got to me. ‘Yes, of course you can.’
I met Beth the next day in our usual spot, a coffee shop halfway between my house and the supermarket in which she worked, and I gave her the letter. She took it, saw it was Penny’s handwriting, and immediately began to well up. And having read it countless times myself, even in the short time it was in my possession, it wasn’t hard to understand why.
Beth,
What we said at the end isn’t important. They were just words. They never mattered to me, because I knew they weren’t true, so they shouldn’t matter to you. What we were then, the things that were said before I left, that wasn’t us. That wasn’t who we were to each other. So don’t fret on them. Whatever’s to come from here, you mustn’t ever fret on them.
There was never anything to forgive because you never did anything wrong. Neither of us did.
We were innocent.
We were children.
So wherever I am when you read this, all you need to know is this: you were my sister, you always will be, and I’ll never stop loving you.
Penny x
81
On the day I flew home from the Empress Islands, a month before Penny’s letter to Beth was unearthed, I’d spent a morning in Sophia talking to Richard Presley on the phone, trying to fill in as many other blanks as I could. He listened quietly, only offering the occasional question, and when I was done he took a long breath, as if he wasn’t quite sure where to go next.
‘What’s it like there?’ he asked.
‘The Empress Islands?’ I was sitting on the steps of the police station, mist clinging to the folds of the mountain once again. It was damp, cold, grey. I looked around at the tin roofs, at the knotty layout of the town, listening to the silence of the place. ‘I guess it’s like a Britain I don’t really know,’ I said.
He was quiet for a moment.
‘So do you like it there?’
I thought about lying to him, telling him I did, just in case he wanted to come back and make a life for himself on the islands again. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. He’d been lied to enough.
‘No,’ I said eventually. ‘I’m looking forward to getting home.’
During our conversation, I’d stopped short of telling him about that night in the cabin, of destroying his recollection of what he thought he’d seen from the window of his childhood home, not because I’d been afraid to – although the thought had made me anxious – but because Carla had asked me to. At some point after we came back down from the Brink, she decided that she wanted to tell him about that night herself.
She’d been there, alongside me, while her husband’s confession had been playing on the tape, so she knew what had gone on; and anything she wasn’t able to work o
ut in those moments, I filled in for her in the hours that followed. Yet at no point did I feel completely at ease about it. I trusted her ability to deliver the news in the most sensitive way possible – she was his mother, after all; she knew him better than anyone else. But that was just the point: Richard Presley wasn’t the same person who’d left the islands almost a year ago. He wasn’t the same person she’d been a mother to for thirty-three years. He didn’t know her, as far as he could remember had never met her, and because of that, I’d begun to wonder if such profound information would be better coming from someone like Reverend Parsons. Richard had built a relationship with him. He trusted Parsons. Parsons had been there for him in the months after he turned up at Southampton Water, when everyone else – all the media attention – had started to fade. In lieu of friends or a family coming forward, Parsons had become something of a father figure to Richard.
I floated the idea of using Parsons to Carla, though never pushed too hard because ultimately it wasn’t my decision. But, as it turned out, it only took one phone call with Richard for Carla to start seeing the sense in it. As I watched her speaking to her son for the first time in two years, I saw her start to understand: his voice was the same, his accent, the way he spoke about things. But it wasn’t the son she remembered. Not quite.
I introduced Richard to his mother on the phone, and when she said hello back, the two of them seemed uncertain where to go next. I filled in the gaps, trying to connect them to one another, and slowly the conversation began to gather momentum. Carla began telling her son what he was like as a boy, what he was like as an adult, and then she mentioned Bill Presley and stopped.
‘Is my dad there too?’ Richard asked.
I looked at Carla.
‘No,’ she said, looking back at me. Tears flashed in her eyes. ‘No, he’s not, sweetheart. Your dad …’ She stopped again. ‘Your dad was, um … He was … He …’
‘He passed on,’ I said.
